Travelin’ Solo – 7.11.13

So it’s been a while since my last entry. But last night was pretty intense, and deeply interesting to me on a personal level, so I thought I’d share. This may be longer than usual.

Yesterday evening marked the second time I’ve drunk Ayahuasca alone. The first occasion was about a week and a half ago. That experience wasn’t particularly eventful, and left me kind of cold, so I was hesitant to do it again. Both times I played a recording of a dieta ceremony in Paoyan. It’s a strange experience, sitting in a room, listening to the icaros pumping out of my computer speakers, and being completely alone. I didn’t much care for it. There are no blessings, as there are no maestros present. And as I’m not in this to simply trip, I wasn’t sure whether or not it was worthwhile to give it another go. As it turns out, I’m glad I did.

I took the Ayahuasca bottle out of the fridge around 8pm, and drank an hour later. During my first solo experience, I drank a relatively small dose, as I was unsure of where it would all lead. But, perhaps because I was overly cautious with the medicine, I didn’t purge. No vomiting, no shitting, nothing. It’s a difficult thing to describe to those who haven’t experienced it, but purging is easily my favorite part of the Ayahuasca ordeal. There’s something profoundly satisfying, refreshing, cleansing about emptying your stomach into a bucket. It’s not like throwing up when you’re sick. There are some similarities, obviously, but you’re expelling more than food and bile. It’s profoundly healing, physically, emotionally and spiritually. I’m not sure that there are words to communicate this effectively.

So, in an effort to guarantee a purge, I went in the opposite direction and took a very large dose last night. It may have been the largest dose I’ve taken so far. About half of a mug. I barely got it down, and had to fight the gag reflex for a few minutes after my last gulp.

I killed the lights, lit a mapacho and said a quiet prayer for guidance, clarity and safety. It’s become part of my ritual. I sat there for what felt like quite a while, listening to dogs barking outside and the occasional revving of a motorcycle engine. Neighbors came and went, and I waited. I started to get impatient, but I stopped myself. As the time passed, I watched the end of my mapacho, burning in the darkness. I always know when the medicine is starting to take hold, because the glowing tip of whatever I happen to be smoking begins to leave trails of light behind it as I turn my head from side to side.

When this commenced and a dizziness set in, I took it as a sign to play the recording. I began rocking back and forth to the sound of the icaros. I often feel, in ceremony,  like some kind of snake being charmed by the songs, moving involuntarily to the sound of the music. This went on for a while, and vague images began to take shape. Scenes of houses in the country, a nuclear explosion that ripped apart a small town, some natural imagery. Then it started up in earnest. I’ll try to describe all of this as I saw it, but chronology is a tricky thing when it comes to Ayahuasca.

I was reprimanded, to begin with. For the last few ceremonies, I’ve been incessantly asking Ayahuasca about herself. Questions like:

“What are you?”

“Why are you helping us?”

“What are you getting out of this?”

Miky refers to the medicine as a grace. I’m still suspicious. I feel like there must be a trade-off for the knowledge we receive during our sojourn in the spirit world. And I’m fine with some kind of metaphysical quid pro quo, but I want to know the price she’s asking before I pay it.

Most times I’ve received (at best) vague responses, or simply silence. This time, however, she had an answer. Of sorts. She told me it was arrogant, wrongheaded and stupid of me to think that I could wrap my head around what she is, and what she’s been for uncounted millenia. She showed me how small, and relatively inconsequential I am as a human being compared to the myriad forms of existence out there. She put me in my place. I felt dwarfed. It seemed like I was standing in the shadow of some enormous, cosmic entity.

So I decided it was best this time around to just shut up and listen to what she had to say.

• Fabric of the Universe: The first thing I experienced was, as in ceremonies past, a vision of the traditional Shipibo textile design being overlayed on everything around me. My eyes were open, and as I looked about the room, I realized that the walls, the chair, the dresser, the ceiling, all were made up of the strange, geometrical patterns so often found embroidered on clothes and tapestries sold in this area of Peru. The designs got smaller, shrank down to the point that they were barely visible. It was then that I realized (or was told – I can’t remember) that somehow this pattern constitutes the underlying fabric of the material universe as we know it.  Many myths speak of a web of matter that’s spun together by some deity or another, which binds everything, and out of which the physical world was created. The Alchemists might call this the Prima Materia. Plato speaks of geometrical archetypes (the Platonic solids) that constitute the root of everything we witness on a day-to-day basis. And philosophers throughout the ages have all maintained that number, shape and symmetry are the only things that truly matter, and that they function as a kind of divine language, speaking to us of the things of God. Sacred geometry. All these thoughts flew through my mind as I watched the shimmering, Shipibo design slowly fade out of view.

• DNA: Suddenly I found myself standing next to some kind of large transparent tube, through which a variety of long, green serpents were rapidly moving. The tube emptied out into what felt like outer space. I vaguely remember seeing clusters of galaxies, spiraling out and glowing with incredible intensity, yellow and white. As I watched, the serpents combined, and gradually merged with one another into the classic double helix form. And suddenly they were no longer snakes, but vast amounts of coiled strands of DNA. I was told to keep watching, and suddenly the DNA blossomed, expanded into a shape that I can’t even describe, but which was vastly more complex than our own genetic material. I felt as though the double helix was multiplied by 6 or 7, and the individual coils were beautifully connected, and radiated outward, mimicking the galactic spirals in the distance. It was as though I was being shown the biological makeup of a being incredibly more advanced than myself. I thought of Francis Crick, the discoverer of the double helix form of DNA, and his theory of directed panspermia, which postulates that at some time in the distant past an unknown culture sent out pieces of its genetic material across the universe, in an attempt to guarantee the survival of their species. Crick, incidentally, first saw the double helix while under the influence of LSD. I was in complete awe. And then it was gone.

• The Garden of Eden: Still surrounded by the breathtaking expanses of the universe, some gigantic hand pulled a canopy over me and created a brand new environment. It was entirely crystalline, and composed of enormous trees that towered above my head, with some kind of unidentifiable fruit hanging down, just out of reach. The whole scene glittered like a diamond. The trees, in ordered rows, felt like they were constructed out of enormous, precious stones that refracted the light from an unseen source. Throughout most creation myths worldwide, you’ll find an island, the place where everything initially came into being. The Japanese refer to the jewel trees of paradise, and it’s found in the epic of Gilgamesh (described as the garden of the sun), the Bible, Indian religious epics, and on, and on… In the past, on numerous occasions, I’ve referred to Ayahuasca as “tangible mythology.” Experiences like this one are why.

• The Bridge: Here’s where I lose the chronology. At some point, I was laying on my back, staring up at the ceiling and listening to the icaros. I think I’ve mentioned before that my hands occasionally seem to take on a life of their own during the ceremony.  They started moving, dancing almost, looking serpentine, and kind of slithering this way and that. I stared at my right hand (painfully aware that I was the embodiment of the stereotypical “tripper” at this point), and it started to disintegrate. I saw pieces of it just kind of fly away. It reminded me of how fleeting the physical truly is, and how foolish and short-sighted I can be when I’m caught up in it. Anyway, as my hand continued to dance there in front of me, it began to beckon to a corner of the ceiling. My eyes were open throughout all of this. Suddenly, from that corner, a hole seemed to open up, and light came through and connected with my head. Following the light, a golden-yellow bridge (that’s inexact, but it’s the best way I can describe it) extended out and appeared to connect with the area immediately above my eyes. It felt like the light was carrying information of some kind, and that it was inserted directly into my brain, or my consciousness…something. There were vague shadows of figures at the far end of the bridge, that I could only barely make out. They seemed to be motioning to me. I was reminded of the Bifrost rainbow bridge from Norse mythology, connecting the world of the gods to the world of men. When whatever was happening was accomplished, the bridge retracted and the light receded and the portal closed. I don’t know what information was deposited in my head, but I was left with a strong suspicion that an enormous serpent had given birth to the world. Interestingly, Miky informed me this morning that according to Shipibo cosmology, a giant Anaconda is responsible for dreaming the world into existence. Still not sure what to do with that, exactly.

• Light: At one point, I was laying on my side, and was bothered by the little green light flickering on my computer. I tried to cover it up, and then I thought I’d ask Ayahuasca a question. I’d been thinking about the electromagnetic spectrum a bit, sound and light waves, so I asked her to tell me something about the nature of light. To show me how it works. She’s been fairly generous in answering my questions of late (those not pertaining to her), and last night was no exception. Soon after I’d asked the question, she showed me light, radiating out from a central source in an arc. It was made clear to me that all light is part of a circle, or a circuit, a closed loop. We see an infinitesimally small portion of it, and assume it to be linear. But (so says Ayahuasca) it’s not. I don’t know what that means exactly. I need to think about it. Toward the end of the ceremony, threads of light from outside of the room made their way through my curtains. I reached out and plucked them like guitar strings. I have a hard time wrapping my mind around that.

• The Circle and Duality: Following the lesson on light, I was placed in the center of a giant circle, which itself was situated in some kind of nebulous, red-tinted version of outer space. I focused on the point of the circle directly ahead of me, and suddenly, my eyes divided, each moving around the side of my head in opposite directions, tracing the limits of the circle surrounding me. This was an odd physical sensation. As my eyes met in the back of my head, they joined together and came up and over, following the medial longitudinal fissure of the brain that divides it into two hemispheres. They followed that path until coming to rest just between my eyebrows, where I felt a very interesting, activating sensation. I know any mention of a “third eye” sounds all too New Agey, but this is an honest record of what I experienced last night, and it has to be included. The lesson here was that in some sense, the observer creates duality. Without our perception, it wouldn’t exist. And yet that begs the question: why are we made to perceive in a dualistic fashion? It might be a chicken and egg situation. What I feel comfortable saying is that there is a relationship between the circle (which is always the symbol used in myth and philosophy to describe the undivided whole that preceded manifested existence) and duality. It’s a general statement, I know. I have yet to figure this particular vision out completely. It may just be something felt, something that’s beyond communication. I thought of the Ouroboros serpent, devouring its own tail.

There were a few other things, as well, but they don’t really need to be discussed. I had to wipe a lot of fuzziness off of myself during the ceremony. I would look at my hands and arms, and they appeared distorted, like I was viewing them through cataracts. When I wiped my hand along the parts of myself that were blurred, the gunk that was responsible for the distortion was removed, and I could see my limbs clearly again. It’s happened before, and it’s very strange.

At some point in the middle of the visions I recorded above, I vomited. Hard. The bucket got its fill.

That’s it for today.

Tierra Vida Ceremony 1 – 4.9.13

So, I’m gonna post this here today, despite the fact that I haven’t finished the account of the dieta. The following ceremony was just held last night, and I want to get it down while it’s still fresh. Excuse any typos, I’m tired.

Let’s just jump right in. Papa Miky contacted me and invited me to a ceremony at a retreat called Tierra Vida, located on an island in the middle of a small lake about 5 minutes or so from my apartment. Over the previous week, following the completion of the dieta, I’d been dying to continue the work, and so I again jumped at the opportunity.

I met Miky and Paul, an Englishman who lives in Pucallpa, at the hotel, and we hired a mototaxi that drove us to the lake. The rest of the group was already there waiting for us, and after a few minutes spent chatting we all hopped into a little wooden boat and shoved off for Tierra Vida.

It was about a 15-20 minute boat ride to the retreat, which (as I’d been told previously) was quite a bit nicer than the setting of the dieta. The maloka was surrounded by a grassy field and enclosed by high vegetation, which lent it a more sanctified appearance. The bathrooms were indoors and connected to the maloka, which is one hell of a luxury, and there was a water dispenser beyond the bathrooms at the end of the hall. What I wouldn’t have given for that during the first ceremony of the dieta.

The shaman who conducted the ceremony is named Gilberto, and he’s the same man with whom Papa Miky was working in Pisac, when I drank my first cup of Ayahuasca. He’s also Benji’s brother, and I’d heard nothing but good things from those who’d spent time working with him previously. I was looking forward to this ceremony, as I had high hopes that the medicine would be strong. It didn’t disappoint.

As the rest of the group got set up in the maloka, I went outside to read a bit in the last light of the day. I’d brought Graham Hancock’s Supernatural with me. That book’s gotten a lot of use. I’ve read it three times, I think, but it contains such a wealth of information that I find myself constantly referring back to it. I opened the book just as Papa Miky and his student, Jan, emerged from the maloka. They were discussing a book by Kim MacQuarrie called The Last Days of the Incas. Papa Miky suggested I might enjoy it, and we got to talking about the history of the Incas and their relationship to the Shipibo. Eventually, the conversation turned to the antiquity of Ayahuasca and I asked if there were any specific legends regarding its origin. Apparently the legends state that Ayahuasca is 10,000 years old, if not older, and Jan mentioned that he’d been reading about a sealed clay vessel containing Ayayhuasca that was recently discovered in Ecuador and dated to roughly 8,000 years ago (6000 BC). Papa Miky then related to me the Shipibo legend of the beginnings of Ayahuasca. It goes like this:

There once was a mapacho healer, who was growing old and was soon to die. He told his people, however, that he would not leave them entirely alone, but would give them something that they could use to access the spirit world and heal themselves. So, when the time came, he went and stood against an old tree, arms outstretched, and died standing upright. Out of his body grew the Ayahuasca vines, and they coiled around him. Then his wife sat down in front of him, inside a traditional Shipibo pot, and she died as well. From her body came forth the chacruna leaves (containing the concentrated DMT) which are boiled with the Ayahuasca vines to make the hallucinogenic brew we were all about to drink.

I find these kinds of stories fascinating. I had a few questions, but I thought I’d save them for another time. The bugs were starting to come out, and Miky and Jan took a walk, presumably to speak with the dieteros (individuals  undertaking a dieta) who were staying on the island and would be joining us for the ceremony.

I went back inside, as the almost certainly carcinogenic deet I’d lathered myself in seemed to have absolutely no effect on the insects’ ravenous appetites. After some time spent in quiet thought, the dieteros trickled in, eventually followed by Jan, Miky, and lastly, Gilberto. I had noticed during the interval that my thoughts were more chaotic, less organized, less focused than they were during the dieta ceremonies that I’d undertaken previously. This chaos was to prove the main opposition to real work for the first hour or so of the ceremony.

When it was time to drink, Papa Miky went from person to person, sizing each of us up and doling out a dose of the putrid medicine accordingly. It was thin, much like the first dieta, but it packed a punch. I spit for a few minutes, and washed my mouth out with a swig of water as Miky finished his rounds and took his place on the mat in the center of the room next to Gilberto.

I want to mention something here.  As I stated in my previous post, the Ayahuasca is kept inside large 1-3 liter soda bottles and poured out into a small, glass cup for the participants. The shamans on the other hand (in this case Miky and Gilberto) always drink directly from the bottle, tilting their heads back and drinking what can only honestly be described as a heroic dose of the brew, sucking down the foul tasting liquid like men dying of thirst. It’s quite a sight to see, and a bit nauseating to contemplate.

Again, the candles were blown out and we sat there in darkness for a while, waiting on the medicine. Immediately after drinking, I started to experience a pain, a burning in my stomach. I didn’t think it would be very long until I vomited. One or two of the dieteros on the other side of the room began vomiting before the icaros even started up, and they seemed to continue vomiting for a good long time, throughout the ceremony.

The icaros are what did it for me. I was starting to feel dizzy, the pain in my stomach was growing, but I wasn’t drunk. When Miky started singing, the song pulled me down deep, fast. I had to lie down. Suddenly that directionless chaos inside my head started playing games. Thoughts, both negative and positive, started assailing me. I tried helplessly to make sense of it all, to sort the bad from the good, to identify the sources of influence, but I couldn’t. So I laid there, starting to writhe and twitch (as I’m wont to do for some reason, but I’ll get into that another time), and desperately trying to differentiate between my ego, Ayahuasca, and/or negative forces that I didn’t want to experience. I felt too physically weak to sit up for a while. This is what I saw, and what I thought (in no particular order) during that time:

1. One of the first things I remember is coming into contact with my arms as I burrowed my head into my poncho. Suddenly, I realized that the arms weren’t mine. They somehow didn’t belong to me. It was like rubbing up against someone else. The same went for the legs. I very quickly felt a foreigner in my own body, which I’ve never experienced like that before. I thought at the time it was as though I was wearing a “skin suit.”

2. With my eyes closed, I recognized a new depth to the visions. Up until this point, I’d been shown scenes for the most part, as though they were projected onto a giant screen inside my head. This was different. When I closed my eyes, there was volume, depth, dimension. This is normal for people who have some experience with Ayahuasca, but for me, it was a new phenomenon. As I stared into the darkness, which felt like it had some vague geometric form to it, suddenly right in front of my face a pair of eyes opened. It was as though I’d been looking at a pair of shut eyelids the entire time, and they simply decided to open up. It was startling. I opened my eyes for a moment, and when I closed them again, whatever I’d seen was gone.

3. As I tried to sort out the competing “voices” in my head, and identify exactly where they were coming from, I felt myself getting concerned that I was losing my grip on reality. So I tried to think of certainties, things beyond question, to calm down. My thoughts went to God. Somewhere in the back of my head I remembered a story that Strassman told in his DMT: The Spirit Molecule about a man who, after taking a large dose of DMT intravenously, was set upon by evil little creatures who were tearing him apart. The one thought that he could successfully cling to was “God is love.” I gave it a shot, but immediately the thought was shot down from a thousand angles and sources that I wasn’t able to identify. I couldn’t justify it. So I cut out the “love” and stuck with “God is.” That seemed to work.

4. Again, I was shown extremely vivid images of decay, this time concentrated on the human body. I saw the limbs and appendages of numerous people in front of me, all beautiful, and then they aged and rotted and fell apart. I refer you to my previous post.

5. As I hugged the ground, trying to hold on to any one thought, feeling, emotion for more than a couple of seconds, trying to find some order, my attention went again to my ex-girlfriend (I mentioned this in my last post). But, immediately upon thinking of her, I was shown some kind of black, seeping liquid, and told in no uncertain terms that the memories I had were poison. I needed to discard them. So I did.

6. I was aware that I needed to vomit, but I didn’t want to do it right away. Not only that, I really wasn’t sure if I could lift myself off of the ground. I felt incredibly weak, physically. Whenever I resisted the idea of throwing up, however, disgusting images of insects in the corners of dirty rooms, and crawling out of sinks and stained toilets, flooded into my mind. This has happened before, though I haven’t posted about it yet.

As I shook pathetically in a fetal position on the floor, feeling at the mercy of my own thoughts, feeling unable to regain control of the situation, suddenly a very clear voice said: “Are you going to get up and do some work or are you just going to lie on the floor and play games with yourself all night?” At that, immediately a sharp and dramatic distinction was made between the nonsense flying around my skull and real work. So I tried to get up, because I knew the first step was vomiting. I felt too weak and fell back on the floor. I was disappointed in myself. Then the voice came back: “You’re a fighter.” I took some pride in that, as I’ve always fought and struggled against, well, everything. But my fighting, lacking direction, boils down to self-destructive anger. I knew that before the ceremony, and I know it now. And then the voice said: “Fight the right things.” It was a simple and obvious truth, and one I needed to hear. So I pushed myself up. I grabbed my vomit bucket, and held that in front of me. I was angry now. Maybe at myself, maybe at whatever was in my stomach, maybe even at the voice. Probably all three. So I white-knuckled the bowl, feeling like I might tear it apart. Unlike the last time I vomited, however, it didn’t just come. In the final ceremony of the dieta, I simply sat up and it pretty much streamed out of my mouth. There wasn’t any stopping it. This time was different.

I held that position for a little while, rocking back and forth to the icaros, with my muscles tense and my eyes wide, gripping the rim of the bowl in front of me. Miky came around to everyone and gave a blessing, though truth be told, I don’t remember that very well. The singing started again, went on for a while, and then stopped. Gilberto began to work with the dieteros. I was shaking, still gripping the bowl and doing what I could to “fight the right things.” Then I noticed that Papa Miky had sat down in front of me. This was a relief, because I knew that I could get this thing (I had started to feel as though it was some living piece of negative energy) out of me if he sang. He began to sing. I don’t know for how long, but I know that all of my energy was concentrated on forcing whatever was inside, outside. I kept trying to heave, to dredge my stomach for this vile little creature living within me. I remember swearing a few times, muttering something like “C’mon fucker.” It took a while. As Miky sang, my senses were more and more captivated. At one point I thought to myself: “This must be what it feels like to be under a spell.” I saw phosphorescent lines, triangles with eyes in them, glowing in the darkness. My vision was taken over by the icaro. I continued to heave, to force the thing up. Finally, it started. I vomited once or twice, getting some on my pants (it was dark and hard to see the bowl). But I wasn’t done. After a few more moments, I really threw up, and I felt as though the body of whatever little evil was inside of me came up my throat and out my mouth.

At that moment, I started laughing. I suppose because of struggling to drag that darkness out of me, The Old Man and the Sea came to mind, and I found it incredibly funny to think of Hemingway in a situation like that. I was done. Miky blessed me with a mapacho and told me to smoke some of it. I could barely grip the thing and when I tried to put it to my mouth I missed my lips completely and it landed somewhere around my nose. I found that confusing. But I started to feel good. There I was, covered in snot, tears and vomit and attempting (unsuccessfully) to smoke a cigarette, but damn I felt good. I got a few good drags of the mapacho smoke into my lungs, choking on each one, before I put it out in my bowl.

It’s a strange thing to say, I know, but I really like vomiting.

For most of the rest of the ceremony, I was happy. I mean, not sloppy happy, just perfectly contented. I was where I was supposed to be, and that’s all that counted. I had done what I was supposed to do, and that in and of itself felt amazing. For about seven months prior, I had felt completely at a loss, and unable to make anything happen. I barely wrote, I almost never read, I’d lost the drive. But somehow this fighting “the right thing” made me realize that I could do it again. Profoundly healing.

Interestingly, for the second time in the ceremony, God entered my thoughts. I have a checkered history with Christianity, and I rarely go to the Bible for answers or comfort these days, preferring instead eastern schools of thought. But all at once, after the vomiting, an Old Testament story sprang up out of the darkness. It was appropriate, it was reassuring, and it felt like balm on a wound. Here it is:

And Jacob was left alone. And a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he touched his hip socket, and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, “Let me go, for the day has broken.” But Jacob said, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” And he said to him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob.”  Then he said, “Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed.”

Obviously the verse above describes something much more dramatic than what I experienced, but at the time it felt as though I had come through an ordeal. Like I had been wrestling with myself, trying to expel old sicknesses that had lived inside of me for many years. So I took comfort in the words.

There are a few more things I should include before I wrap this up:

• After vomiting, my vision and conception of reality were both greatly affected. The room occasionally took on the appearance of a fun-house mirror. At one point Gilberto left the maloka, and went outside. I didn’t know why, but I figured he knew what he was doing. When he came back in, it looked to me as though his stomach was pulsating. The best way I can describe it is that it looked as if there were 15 babies inside of him kicking away.
• When I went to stretch out on the mat after Papa Miky had finished singing, there was something like a loud cracking behind me. I don’t know if I imagined that or if it was real and served as a catalyst for the hallucination. I turned to look at the front door, and it almost appeared as though an animal was trying to get into the maloka. I turned away, and then turned back, and it was gone. But the door was broken. It looked like shards of wood and blowing mosquito netting. I could even feel the wind, and I thought the insects were starting to rush in. I decided that I should check it out and do what I could to close it, but once I sat up I realized that the door was completely intact and fully shut. These two examples really constitute the first times that I’ve seen things convincingly altered in the “real world” with my eyes open.
• The last thing I want to mention is that I started to think about why Ayahuasca ceremonies are always conducted in the dark. The way it makes sense to me is by thinking of any kind natural gestation and growth. It’s all accomplished in the dark. The embryo is sheltered from direct light in the womb, the seed is buried deep in the earth. I realized, as I sat there, that this must be why ancient cultures tend to associate the moonlight with growth and transformation. Then it struck me that perhaps the reflected light of the sun as seen in the moon is comparable to the light that reaches the human embryo, filtered through the womb of the mother. Maybe it’s horseshit. Maybe not.

That’s it for last night.

nourayou dieta – first ceremony – 3.19.13

So we left from the hotel at around 6:00 in the evening. In Pucallpa, the majority of the vehicles on the road are open air mototaxis, and can’t accommodate more than three people at a time. Even three can be a little tight. There were 11 of us, I believe, and we ended up taking 4 taxis to the little Shipibo village about 45 minutes into the jungle, where the ceremony was to be held. We bumped and hurtled down dirt roads, past a little docking station for river boats, moving further and further away from any visible semblance of civilization. As the path ahead of us twisted along, occasionally we’d see a small hut with a thatched roof, or a few people walking along the side of the road. Mainly, though, it was just us, the plants and the bugs.

When we arrived at the village it was nearly 7:00, and the sun had almost completely set. It was still sweltering, of course, and the mosquitoes descended upon me almost immediately. I’d heard stories about how bad the insects could be in the jungle, and I’d come to Pucallpa prepared, but in the city there’s really no problem until after dark. Unaware of how remote the location of the ceremony was, I hadn’t used any bug spray before leaving, nor had I brought a bottle with me. So for that first night, the bugs feasted. But we all gotta eat.

The maloka

We walked into the maloka (the name given to the large, round huts in which the ceremonies are generally conducted), and inside there was a giant tent, made of mosquito netting, set up on the floor. Thank god. We all scurried in there, and the girls immediately started killing everything that moved. Apparently the setting of their previous dieta was nicer. The big, fat ants that crawled around on the floor really seemed to bother them, and there was quite a bit of slapping and cursing for the first ten minutes.

On the ride over, I’d sat in the mototaxi with Papa Miky and a man named Ivan. Ivan lives in Capetown, but he’s originally from New Jersey. He also spent about 20 years in India, living in the same ashram as Papa Miky, and they had studied aspects of Hinduism together. Papa Miky had told me a little bit about that chapter of his life over our initial breakfast meeting. Apparently Miky had studied Vedanta in India for quite some time, and even taught classes on the subject, until he realized that he wanted to do more and eventually ended up in Peru. He trained with the Shipibo for about 12 years before becoming a maestro himself 2 years ago.

We were all provided with well worn mats to sit on, but most of us declined, preferring the floor and a blanket to whatever was almost certainly living inside those sad, oblong pieces of flattened foam. Everyone seemed to be pretty practiced by this point, and they all spent some time arranging the various items they’d brought with them for the ceremony. See, there are some essentials that you absolutely need to have a pleasant ceremony:

• Toilet paper – Oh yeah. A couple rolls. Chances are, you’re gonna vomit. But you might just shit instead. And you really don’t want to be without papel higiénico when you do.
• Flashlight – When you feel the need to run to the bathroom, it’s nice to know where you’re going. No streetlights in the jungle.
• Water – Unless you’ve embarked on a dieta that prohibits it, it’s good to know that you’ve got a liter of water with you to wash the taste of the brew out of your mouth. It can be pretty rancid.
• A blanket – Ayahuasca can be physically exhausting, and it’s helpful to have a blanket to cover up with or use as a pillow when you inevitably pass out toward the end of the ceremony.
• Cigarettes – A lot of people buy mapachos, which are basically extremely heavy, potent, unfiltered cigarettes full of rustic tobacco. I have yet to develop a taste for them, so I usually just buy a pack of whatever’s handy. Either way, for some reason, the tobacco seems to compliment the experience quite well. Jeremy Narby reports that according to the Ashaninka people who live in and around the Ucayali region, tobacco is the child of Mother Ayahuasca.

Then there are the various sundries that people choose to take with them into ceremony. These include bug spray, little Shipibo textiles that they’ve purchased previously, bottles of agua florida (I’ll get to that later), or assorted nick nacks that bring them some comfort.

So what did I bring? Well, I was an idiot. I forgot my toilet paper, I didn’t (and still don’t) own a flashlight, left my water on my bed at home, and was down to my last three cigarettes. I did have a poncho that I’d purchased in Pisac about 6 months prior, so I used that as my blanket. I knew my bag felt a little light. Ivan, who was sitting next to me, was kind enough to ration a bit of water for me, which was very nice. At this point, upon realizing everything that I hadn’t brought with me, I was just praying that I didn’t shit myself.

The shaman who conducted the ceremony is named Benjamin. He’s widely known and highly respected throughout Peru for his spiritual abilities. I have been told by numerous people now that he represents the best that Pucallpa has to offer. He was the one who taught Miky for over a decade before eventually making him a shaman in his own right. Papa Miky told me that the spiritual traditions of the Shipibo are usually passed from father to son, in an unbroken line of succession. In this case, however, Benji’s sons had no interest in shamanism. So, Benjamin, recognizing in Miky both desire and ability, chose to teach him instead.

So we all sat there in the maloka, kind of getting into our own space, for some time. Benji, Miky and some of Benji’s family were in the front of the room, talking and laughing. The rest of us were arranged in a horseshoe pattern facing them, illuminated by the light of three small candles placed around the maloka. It got quiet after a while, and I think each of us took the time to reflect on what we were about to do, and our reasons for being there. Then it was time to drink.

Benji took out a large, plastic Coca-Cola bottle filled with a viscous, black and brown liquid that he and Miky slowly poured into a little glass cup, calling each one of us up to drink separately. When it was my turn, I walked up, took the glass and downed it as quickly as I could. I wasn’t trying to put on a brave face, it’s just that if I had spent too much time thinking about the contents of the cup, I may not have been able to get it down. So far, I’ve found that the taste of Ayahuasca can best be described as some mixture of citrus, chocolate and raw sewage. It’s actually not so bad, though. I personally think San Pedro cactus is much worse. The most stomach churning part of Ayahuasca, in my opinion, is not the taste but the texture. Lucky for me, this particular batch was relatively thin and easy to swallow, so I drank it with no problems and returned to my blanket.

The aftertaste is generally unpleasant, as it tends to linger, and it usually results in a spate of spitting and coughing from everyone around the room. So after everyone had finished gagging and hocking up the remnants of the brew into the vomit bowls which had been distributed earlier, the candles on the floor were extinguished and we all sat in silence as we let the medicine take hold.

It seemed slower in coming than the first time I drank in Pisac, and it was a good long while before Benji began to softly sing the icaros, the shamanic songs of Ayahuasca that really become the focal point of every ceremony. Icaros can be passed from person to person, or they can be given to the shaman directly by Ayahuasca herself. Regardless, for me and many others I’ve spoken to, they seem to act as your anchor to this world, and they call you back from that other plane of existence when it’s necessary.

When they started, I immediately recognized them as being the same icaros that had been sung the first time I drank in Pisac, and I suddenly felt an overwhelming sense of comfort, of happiness, of being at home. I lay on my back for a while and stared up, smiling into the darkness. It took some time for me to begin feeling the effects of the brew, and this batch of Ayahuasca felt much gentler than what I’d drunk previously. After a bit, it came on, and the visions started, very slowly. They weren’t intense, and they were somewhat muddled, but I’ll give you as much of a description as I can without embellishing (this is pretty much straight from my journal):

1. Still laying on my back, I was intensely dizzy. Various images appeared and disappeared, some of them probably generated by me, and some by Ayahuasca. Then, suddenly, when I kept my eyes shut, I was laying on a table. I was in some kind of, well, ship. There was a large window in front of me, and outside of it there were planets. My hands were grey, and my fingers were spindly and elongated. I was still myself, but I was in a stereotypically alien body. My hands, both in the vision and in “real life,” were moving and dancing around to the rhythm of the icaro being sung, seemingly of their own accord. This is a common occurrence for me. My hands seem to know what’s necessary, and they kind of bounce around and get my attention when it’s required. Anyway, within the vision, my hands suddenly started moving in a line along my solar plexus. As they did, they cut open my chest, through my bone, as though they were lasers. I pulled apart my flesh, exposing the inside of my chest. At that point, what seemed like two people (also alien in appearance) were standing over me, and one of them poured a red liquid from a silver vessel that reminded me of a gravy boat into my chest cavity. Then my fingers closed me back up, and that was the end of that.

2. Before I tell you this next part, a little background: During my very first ceremony in Pisac, I really didn’t want to shit myself, and I also wanted to avoid vomiting, if at all possible. The medicine was strong in Pisac, and throughout the night, I was having very literal conversations with the plant inside of me. Several of these conversations consisted of me asking Ayahuasca to allow me to get by without purging. The answer was very clear: “Okay. But you’re going to miss out on a lot of physical benefit.” I was fine with that at the time, and I didn’t purge.  This time, before the ceremony, I resolved that I would be open to anything that came, including the most unpleasant physical aspects of the Ayahuasca experience. However, despite feeling more open to it at the beginning, I started asking for a pass yet again. When I did, I was shown a series of meandering visions that are impossible to describe, but that ended up at what looked like a giant, white crack in a black universe. It was made clear to me at that point that my momentary cowardice was just another in a long line of broken promises, and that finally, I myself am, in fact, just a broken promise. It was humbling, and ugly. And again, I didn’t purge.

3. There was a point where I was shown numerous visions of decaying objects. I remember a large, metal padlock, with a key stuck in the top of it. It was there, in front of my face, brand new. And then it began to decay. It was covered in rust, cracked and falling apart, and coiled around by ivy, like I was watching a time lapse video. At the time, I wondered if this was a warning about death, but after some reflection, I realized that what I was being shown is just the transitory nature of physical things, the temporal body.

4. At one point, I asked about reconciliation with my ex-girlfriend, with whom I’d been in a relationship for 7 years, and who I’d been having an unbelievably difficult time getting over. The answer was a firm “no.” I didn’t like that. And at that point, I didn’t want to believe that the answer had come from Ayahuasca. Maybe it had been my imagination, etc… But I was just rationalizing. The answer was clear.

5. I was also shown numerous scenes having to do with space, planets, etc… which seemed strangely similar to Michael Harner’s vision, described in The Way of the Shaman. It’s certainly possible that reading his book influenced my thoughts and conjured up those scenes in front of me, but after experiencing several ceremonies now, I’m not as skeptical as I once was. There were points of light that were falling out of the darkness of space toward earth. I seemed to travel with them for a moment. I’ll leave this one to your interpretation.

That was it for the memorable visions this time around.

During each ceremony, there’s a point where Miky comes around to all of us, and performs a blessing. I’ll describe that briefly. He sits in front of you, and takes a little bit of what’s called agua florida in his mouth. Agua florida is basically a natural perfume (non-toxic) that’s used in Ayahuasca blessings and purifications along with the mapacho cigarettes. So he takes a bit of this in his mouth, and you bow your head, and he blows the agua florida on the crown of your skull. There’s a really particular noise associated with the exhalation that’s surprisingly pleasant. Then he asks for your hands, and you hold them out in front of you, palms together. He takes another small swig of agua florida and blows this onto your hands and arms, as well. During the ceremony in Pisac, my two friends and I agreed that he looked like some kind of giant bird as he moved around the room, blessing people, landing and taking off. This time, probably because of how low the roof of the tent was, he looked like a jungle cat, stalking from person to person. Very interesting.

Alright, so some general observations:

• As in Pisac, when the medicine took hold, I started to hear what I could’ve sworn were English words mixed into the icaros. I couldn’t tell what was being said, but it was there. It was like hearing a conversation through a thick door.
• My ego is so big, and so sensitive, that I was convinced that whoever happened to be talking in the room was talking about me. This feeling has improved greatly, but it was something I was meant to notice at the time.
• Despite the intensity of the medicine, the “me” of “me” was left largely intact. When it was time for those dieting to come and sit together and be blessed by Benji, I felt an incredible surge of impatience. All I wanted to do was return to my corner and be left alone. I couldn’t wait for the damn thing to be over. But the feelings of impatience weren’t really coming from the immediate situation. This is how I live life, and I was meant to notice this, too.
• Again, some background: there’s a French physicist named Beneviste who discovered that every molecule has its own frequency, and this frequency can be isolated and reproduced electronically. When the electronic frequency is directed at a given internal organ, the organ responds as though the original molecular body had been injected into the bloodstream. Okay. So, for some reason it occurred to me that perhaps this is related to the icaros of Ayahuasca. Could the icaros in some way be connected to the frequency of Ayahuasca (or DMT), explaining why the songs and the plant seem to work in unison so well? Maybe there’s something there. Or maybe it’s too materialistic. Either way, interesting.

DMT molecule

So, here’s the lesson (for lack of a better word) I took from the first ceremony (directly from my journal):

• As I think about it, the lesson of the session would have to be patience. There were many times during the ceremony when I wanted to know what time it was, to see how much longer it would last. Or at the beginning, when I was becoming restless and wondering how long it would take to set it. Or during the dieta blessing, when I was terribly impatient with Benji for singing too long and just wanted to return to my blanket. Each time I would have these thoughts, a realization would follow quickly on their heels: “What are you doing? Be here.” Each selfish, impatient thought did not simply come and go, serving no purpose. They were used to focus my attention on that aspect of myself that is incredibly juvenile and petulant. This is something I’ve always known about my life and my behavior, but I’ve never devoted much attention to it. So, if I had to nail it down, patience is the lesson of this particular ceremony.

So that’s it for the first ceremony. I’ll post a bit more tomorrow.

first dieta – intro and background

Me looking morose and/or sleepy. But probably morose.

Most people reading this blog already know me, and know why I returned to Peru in 2013, after a brief sojourn in California with the family. Prior to that I had lived in the south of Peru, in Cusco (the ancient Inca capital) and Arequipa (the second largest city in the country) for about a year and a half. For those who don’t know me, my reason for returning boils down to this: I need to get well. There’s nothing physically wrong with me (I assume), but like most people I know,  I have chronic, recurring, emotional and spiritual afflictions that I have so far been unable to successfully address. Ayahuasca, the sacred hallucinogenic brew that’s been in continual use for an indeterminately long period of time, may represent the very real possibility of finally putting my own issues to rest and, simply, becoming a better person.

I flew down to Pucallpa, Peru in late February of 2013. I had drunk Ayahuasca once before, with a Canadian-born shaman who had trained for many years with the Shipibo natives of the Ucayali region. His name was Papa Miky, and I and the two friends who attended the ceremony with me were quite impressed by both the quality of his medicine and his natural abilities in the ceremony. In January of ’13, about a month before I was scheduled to fly to Peru, I found out that Papa Miky lived full time in Pucallpa, so it seemed logical to contact him once I got there, since I’d had such a positive experience with him in the past.

We met briefly for breakfast, and we talked a little about my reasons for returning, what Ayahuasca can offer, and Papa Miky’s personal history. I won’t get into too much of that for now, but I do want to repeat what I felt was one of the most significant comments Miky made during our initial meeting. We were discussing the promise of Ayahuasca, and it’s potential for good, and he said that Ayahuasca shows you the problem, but it won’t do the work for you. The work is still our responsibility, but Ayahuasca can take us to the root of a lifelong disorder, so that we can begin to treat the cause of the disease, and not just suppress the symptoms. It’s an important point, I think.

So we left it at that, nothing formalized, just a pleasant introductory conversation. It was a few weeks later that he got in contact with me via email, informing me that a ceremony would be held on Tuesday, March 19th. I jumped at it, and I was told that I should meet Miky (along with about 10 other people who would be participating in the ceremony) at a nearby hotel, and we’d depart from there.

On the 19th, I got to the hotel a bit early and had a chance to meet the rest of the participants. Most of them had just finished a dieta with Papa Miky about a week or so before. A dieta (Spanish for “diet”) is a series of ceremonies, usually held every other day, that may last anywhere from 10 days to 6 months or more. Dietas also include dietary proscriptions, which vary depending on the kind of dieta you’re undertaking. Sometimes salt, sugar, fruit, etc… are entirely forbidden for the duration of the dieta. Much to my surprise, Papa Miky informed me that most of the other participants would be opening a new dieta that night, and he invited me to join them, if I felt so inclined. I had heard that dietas could be deeply challenging, both physically and spiritually, and I wasn’t entirely sure that I was ready. But, as he explained the specifics of it, it began to appeal to me. I also realized that were I to squander this opportunity, I might not get another for several weeks, or maybe a month.  I was eager to start the work I’d come to do, so I decided to go for it.

The dieta we were opening that night is called nourayou (pronounced new-ra-yow), and is sometimes referred to as “The Tree of Life” dieta. This dieta is unique, as it comes with no dietary restrictions (save the universal prohibition on sex, drugs and alchohol), but requires a 24-hour fast from the participant, every other day. I’ll give you the rundown: On the day of drinking, at 1:00pm, we were required to stop eating. It’s always a good idea to eat as little as possible on drinking days anyway, as there’s that much less to vomit up later. Between 1:00 and 8:00pm, we could still drink water. But when we drank Ayahuasca at 8:00, water was strictly prohibited from that point forward, until the end of the fast at 1:00pm the following day. This may not sound like much, but when you experience how racking and physically exhausting the process of drinking Ayahuasca really is, well…it starts to drain you.

So why is the dieta called “The Tree of Life”? Well, as Papa Miky explained it, the seed of the “tree of life” is implanted in the body of the participant by the officiating shaman (we’ll get to that), and it is watered by the fasting, the sacrifice that you make to the process. The tree then grows, and as it does, you are opened to a world in which there exist very well-defined, free-standing spiritual entities that communicate with you telepathically, giving you vast amounts of revelatory information that you can choose to act on, or not. This particular dieta is quite ancient, and there exist very few mentions of it online. The reason? It began to die out long ago, and the particular family of Shipibo with whom Papa Miky works are among the only natives still committed to keeping the tradition alive. I’m not going to discuss it much further, as Miky and the Shipibo have expressed concern that if the details of the cosmology behind the dieta were more widely known, they’d be exploited for material gain just as other aspects of Ayahuasca have been and continue to be. The specifics seem to be closely guarded secrets, and Miky told a few of us that only about 50 westerners have undergone this particular type of dieta. He was quick to follow that up, however, by stating that it doesn’t matter what anyone has experienced if they can’t put it to good use in their lives.

Having done my homework for several years before actually drinking the brew, I had (and continue to have) some personal reservations about the the world to which Ayahuasca opens us. I have no trouble believing that Ayahuasca lifts the veil on a free-standing reality that co-exists with our own – call it the spirit world, or another dimension, what have you. But my concern is that this alternate plane of existence may not be entirely beneficial to the human race. There seem to be indications, lurking around the fringes of the literature, that there can be a surprisingly dark side to the whole experience. I won’t get into it now, because there will be time enough for that later, but for those interested, I’d suggest reading the last chapter of Peter Gorman’s Ayahuasca in My Blood, Michael Harner’s experience in The Way of the Shaman, and Graham Hancock’s account of his recent Ayahuasca experiences in Brazil. Additionally, some of the encounters reported in Rick Strassman’s DMT: The Spirit Molecule are less than comforting. That said, however, I want to be clear that all of my experiences so far (limited though they may be) have been incredibly positive and profoundly helpful on a personal level. For me, this is something that I have to explore thoroughly. Experience, as one expat I met down here recently said, is the only kind of knowledge that’s really worth a damn.

Alright, enough for now.