The spiritual adventure of our time is the exposure of human consciousness
to the undefined and the undefinable. -C. G. Jung
You die, I die — Where can we meet? -Zen saying
(Except for Blue Morpho staff, names of ceremony participants have been changed.)
THE CALL
We take off from Lima, arc out over the Pacific Ocean, and circle back to cross the bone-dry Andes carved luminous and sharp by evening shadows. Clouds of humongous popcorn herd on the jagged peaks as we approach and pass through.
As the sky darkens I’m looking down at Amazon jungle. It’s not parceled up the way it seemed when my son Philip and I google-earthed the area around Iquitos and saw it from outer space. This jungle we’re flying over now is an etheric geyser rippling waves of green and black force 30,000 feet up. When the Amazon River comes into view it feels alive like a whale.
Perfect thatched roofs come into view underneath as we descend toward Iquitos at what cinematographers call “the magic hour.” I’ve never been to a dimension quite like this. I was called here by what felt like the Earth itself. Some people will understand a statement like that and some won’t. Sensing “the Call,” especially from a nonhuman entity — from a planet, no less — may be considered a bit farfetched by some, insane by others. And yet I know I’m not the only one who understands that this sort of ancient animism may hold the key to the future, if our species wants to survive.
Still, I didn’t trust the Call instantaneously. I’m as “modern” as the next guy, and just as skeptical in my own way. But skeptics aren’t all equally skeptical of the same things, are we? Even if “following a Call” sounds little more than self-delusional, I’m far less skeptical of something like that than, say, the “patriotic” reasons for going to war in Iraq. But did I really trust this enough to go all the way to Peru? In time, I did. At moments, yes. Then I’d lose the trust, or forget the reason for going. Even now as we land in Iquitos I’m wondering, What am I doing here?
When we land, the burnt wreckage of a commercial airliner at the end of the runway actually makes me more certain: This is the right place, the right time, and it is all unknown!
MAESTROS & APPRENTICES
I’m eating crackers at Blue Morpho. We’re 53 kilometers south of Iquitos, three-quarters surrounded by dense jungle. Blue Morpho is one of several places you can come to if you want to experience the shamanistic medicine ayahuasca. I’m here with twenty-five other people, two Maestro shaman, and two apprentices. The people of the area, who make our food and prepared our bungalows, will also assist us during the ceremonies in case we get lost in the dark, need help to the bathroom, or start losing our minds.
Hamilton is a white, blonde shaman from California whose original career plan was to become a professional golfer. Blue Morpho is his enterprise. But his love is the Medicine, it’s so clear, and Blue Morpho serves that Medicine. How he got from California to the Amazon is, of course, an amazing story. At 29, he’s a big kid, six foot six — and a fantastic joker — and, most of all: a spirit-being who transcends biographical age. He could be my brother, my son, or my father. He is easily, yet indirectly, one of my finest teachers. Don Alberto, who actually is my age, initiated Hamilton, along with don Julio who left the world last year. Hamilton says the only direction he got at first from Julio and Alberto was 1) “Drink it and forget you drank it” and 2) “Don’t let anything dominate you.” Other minimal instructions to apprentices included, “Stay in your seat” (meaning, Don’t fall down!) and “Keep the beat” (for music makes the whole thing happen). Hamilton says, with ayahuasca the main learning and healing come from simply surviving it. He says the kind of knowledge you get from ayahuasca is not informational so much as transformational learning.
STORIES & PREPARATION
I’m impressed by the amount of preparation we are given by Hamilton and the apprentices, Daniel and Mimi. Don Alberto does not speak much English, but his presence remains a big part of what’s going on here — his earthy laughter and feet on the ground. Hamilton says don Alberto grounds him and anchors the Earth energies in our ceremonies, whereas he gravitates toward the celestial realms. Physically this is clear: Don Alberto could be a woodchuck, or a serious yet bemused frog spirit, or just a guy chopping wood. Seemingly two or three feet taller than his teacher, Hamilton is a lanky shaft of light, a giant golfer who uses lightning for clubs. Both of them are no-nonsense, and yet full of humor.
So they joke about how scary it can be. And they also give strategies for dealing with darkness and fear. The apprentices tell their stories, too, how they got to Peru and got here, and how they’ve struggled with fear. Hamilton says when he finally learned how to stop being afraid of fear new doors opened.
We’ll be doing five ceremonies. Apparently there’s a kind of learning curve — or maybe it’s more like a cleansing curve. Ayahuasca — “the Vine of Death” — is also called “the Purge.” Like the force of Pluto in astrology, ayahuasca cleans you out. The first couple of ceremonies are usually the hardest because there’s so much to clean out. But the shamans make it clear that it’s different for everyone. It all depends what the spirits have in store for you. Some people get blown away during the later ceremonies.
FIRST CEREMONY
The Ceremonial House has a high conical roof, with no central support. Hamilton designed it, and the building of this magical place is one more amazing story he tells us later. At this moment we’re finding our places on the floor. Everybody gets a mattress, a pillow, and a blanket. At the foot of the mattress, a vomit bucket, a roll of toilet paper to wipe one’s mouth, and a tin cup to rinse. Purging can happen any number of ways — trembling, sighs, yawns, visual and auditory phenomena — and also, vomiting (“the upper purge”) and shitting (“the lower purge”). We have already been familiarized with the eventualities and terminology of an ayahuasca ceremony. Icaros are the special songs the shamans and apprentices will sing to bring in various spirits and energies, as well as the mareacion itself — the effects of the ayahuasca. We had been shown the ayahuasca vine and trees from which bark ingredients for the mixture were taken and leaves of the chakruna bush. Yesterday we helped in the preparation — chopping vine and washing and crushing plant ingredients which were then cooked all day in six big pots over a fire. We had also been encouraged to revisit the trees and vine on our own, to greet and befriend their spirits — “Nothing fancy,” says Hamilton, “You can just say Hi.”
Now tonight is the night. Some have done this before. Most have not. However, it’s clear in our discussions that we’ve all experimented with altered states. It’s a quest we share. A quest that, again, others may be skeptical of or even criticize. Is this nothing but “drugs and escape from reality” — or a bona fide quest of the soul, a continuing tradition of the search for the grail, a search for god, a search for knowledge and purpose? Even that search arouses different opinions — Do we humbly seek the divine? Or are we like Faust and Science looking for keys to a power that will only bedevil us in the end? Are we babbling builders of yet another doomed tower to Heaven? Is this Adam inside me reaching for the forbidden apple?
Earlier that day we had the option of meeting individually with Hamilton and don Alberto to discuss concerns and intentions. I told them I wanted to deepen my connection with spirit. I added that I was a little concerned that certain death experiences might come up, involving a wake I had been to as a boy. Supposedly I had given the spirit of that boy permission to “ride” with me and continue his life by living through mine. The shamans listened carefully but made no comment. We shook hands. I felt a little self-conscious, but I also felt their openness and respect. In the Amazon you can talk about spirits and be taken seriously.
Our mats face the front of the Ceremonial House where shamans and apprentices sit upright in chairs. On the floor between Hamilton and don Alberto stands “the mesa” — the physical counterpart to a metaphysical place where the healing power of their ayahuasca lineage is situated. This earthly mesa is a mélange of crystals, rocks and other personal artifacts, plus our own personal items brought from home for blessing and support.
Two glowing oil lanterns on the floor, our only light.
Two apprentices working opposite sides of the group ask us one at a time how much ayahuasca he or she would like to drink. You can say, for example, “a half cup”, “a quarter cup” — or, my favorite, “Let the spirits decide.”
When Mimi comes around to me I give the decision to spirit, Mimi relays this to Hamilton, and he pours ayahuasca into my cup singing into it softly. Everyone gets a different song, according to what the spirits tell him. Sometimes it’s singing and sometimes a magical kind of whistling. I listen curiously to the song Hamilton sifts into mine. When Mimi brings the cup over, I see it’s almost up to the top.
Okay.
The taste is nowhere near as bad as people said. Hamilton is one person who said he always kind of likes the taste, and I have to agree. It’s a nutty, woody, earth-flavor, but very strong, almost overwhelming. As recommended, I greet the Medicine as it enters my body. After swallowing what tastes like “wild liquid Earth” I move my tongue around in my mouth, absorbing the fascinating flavor, and lay down on my mattress. It takes quite awhile for everyone to get their cup. Hamilton does a long invocation, part Spanish, and part Quechua, and other languages too. The spirits come when they’re called. The shamans hold the space and keep us protected, because not all spirits have good will toward human beings — and also the jungle is filled with other shamans who went to the dark side and have become psychic predators.
Okay.
The lanterns go out. Darkness covers us. The songs will protect us. The shamans shake shakapas — “leaf rattles” which are really more like large bouquets of dried leaves. The soft sh, sh, sh sound is soothing, and the songs mean the ceremony has begun. I don’t feel any change for awhile, but the songs are beautiful and mysterious.
From my spot on the mattress I notice a beam of light coming through the screen of the Ceremonial House, flashing on and off at irregular intervals. It seems to be signaling me. The sounds of the jungle outside are marvelous, along with the singing inside. I’m not sure if this flashing beam is “real” or a visual phenomenon of the ayahuasca. It is easy to imagine that it and I are communicating. It feels like a friendly exchange. Affectionate and curious. The first steps toward some mysterious rapport…. It makes me laugh.
Though the shamans had started their singing in unison, at a certain point I notice there are different songs being sung simultaneously now, and yet they weave in and out of each other as if part of a larger whole. It’s very much like an expressive arts “sound tapestry” — a group of people improvising vocally with their eyes closed. Here, though, I feel the substance of focused intent in their music. Yet it is perfectly relaxed. Grace and ease. A medicine concert.
Later I find out from Hamilton that the songs aren’t improvised at all — though surely the interplay among four different singers is unpredictable and organismic to the moment. Each shaman sings the icaros he or she feels called to bring in, and those are the spirits who are summoned.
Suddenly I’m excited by these sounds unlike anything I’ve heard before. I sit up, my chest filling with warmth, the room is dark night, and the ceremonial singing feels “fully underway.” We are “underway.” We seem to be traveling together somewhere. I feel only slightly altered, but am aware of breathing some kind of love, and the sky is filled with stars. The roof is gone. We’re still in the same room, but the gigantic conical thatched roof has completely vanished. I know it couldn’t literally be gone, and yet I’m enjoying the stars anyway.
FLOWER PIRATES
As the singing increases in intensity, everything becomes flowers, the shamans and apprentices are pirates on a boat of flowers sailing on a sea of blossoms , like floats in a parade. I know I’m in a visionary space, but it takes a few weeks before I realize this was my personal vision. It’s not necessarily what everybody else experienced! Flowers and music, pirates on a ship of love all made of flowers. I learned later that some people could hardly hear the music that night because of everything else that was going on with them. Yes, people are vomiting all around me in the dark but I’m caught up in the music and the color and the ancientness of these shamans who now feel like bluesmen playing deep Earth rhythms and starry flights where eternity is medicine, dreams, and beauty on a Pachamama planetoid. I can’t help singing along and talking, agreeing with the music and the bluesmen — “Yeah! Yeah, that’s right!” This is what my life’s supposed to be.
Even when I do finally vomit, and with gusto, it’s a multi-colored experience moving through a tunnel of rainbow jewels, completely acceptable. Splendid!
The taste of ayahuasca permeates my mouth in a wonderfully alien way.
Other processes would come and go, many of which I may not remember. At one point there was a peaceful “memory-review” of my difficult yet, in its own way, profound life with Vikki…at the end of which I feel total acceptance of the way things went, an acceptance of her, and us, the birth of our son, our divorce, our struggling collaborative aftermath — our whole story. Since I haven’t really been troubled by “us” recently — as Vikki seems to be getting her life together, has recently remarried, and I am feeling basically hopeful about her — this “visitation” is unexpected. I find myself appreciative and at peace about this huge chapter of my life, and about her, a warm place.
I also find myself meditating about my friend Mark Clarke who died of cancer in 1989. This too is curious. Why Mark Clarke? Why now? And again, the aim seems similar: a review of our friendship and new appreciation for what was fateful or sacred in our connection. I am shown that he and I knew something special we couldn’t put into words — but we knew it and we both knew the other knew it. It was a look we shared in the eyes — and that was the basis of our fond and humorous, yet darkly serious bond. We shared the knowledge that life is brief and awesome — and so weird….
When the lanterns come on, three hours after we’d begun, I am still mareado — still undergoing the effects of the ceremony. Most of us are. Some remain quiet. Others talk softly. Those who wish to engage in conversation had been encouraged to go to the Main House. Eventually I find my way there too. I’m still feeling fairly light-headed. After I sit down in one of the re-bar rocking chairs, a guy named Kurt offers to get me a glass of water. It’s the most beautiful gesture. A single lantern reflects on our meditative faces as if we’re all sitting around a camp fire. It’s curious to me how little is said about what just happened. Maybe we just need the company. Later I find out that for a few people nothing happened at all.
I remember one woman caught in her own personal hell who kept calling out “O God!” Finally Hamilton called back, “You’ve called to God, now listen to God! Let God answer!” Sometimes laughter surfaced during the ceremony — sometimes the icaros themselves seemed to call forth a kind of effervescence moving through the crowd like bubbles rising up in the form of contagious sniggers and laughs that spread buoyancy through the room — even when that woman calls out again in total despair, “O God!” Sometimes you’d find yourself laughing even at things like that, and it’s hard to explain why. Another woman calls out, “Hamilton! Is the octopus good or bad?”
“It’s just an octopus,” he calls back, the other shamans still singing and shaking their shakapas — “What does it want?”
She pauses…. “He won’t say!”
“Well, how do you feel?” says Hamilton, “If you don’t feel like hanging out with the octopus, tell him to go away.”
She says, “I kind of like him.”
Later on her tears are flowing. Hamilton points out that she had been visited by a water spirit.
It occurs to me that the social dimension of these ceremonies becomes an added theater of everyone’s private spiritual experience. When I’m bugged or moved by the people around me, or whatever — when I feel paralyzed by compassion in the presence of other people’s suffering hell-realms, or feel angry that their conversation is disturbing my visionary concentration — that all becomes part of my vision too. We are 25 people who don’t even know each other, shitting and vomiting together, laughing, crying. Some of us are motionless soundless catatonics in the thrall of this ayahuasca spirit storm where my flower pirates sail singing Jolly Beauty Healing….
At the end of the first ceremony I receive a message: Tonight we’re giving you an introduction to the general framework — but tomorrow we’re going to kick your butt.
Now maybe that is the “dark spirit” of my own fear talking , or just guilt about enjoying anything (especially when people next to me are suffering) — or maybe it’s indeed a word to the wise, a spirit of preparation designed to give me sober pause.
There’s only one way to find out.
NEXT DAY
We’d eaten nothing since lunch the day before, a required fast prior to every ceremony. So breakfast the next morning looks good, even though I’ve been shitting my brains out. When I arrived at Blue Morpho, after five days of eating new foods in Lima, my stomach was already a loose cannon. As advised, I’d managed to avoid all unpeeled fruit except for a single raspberry given to me by the magic toddler of my Peruvian friends. I hadn’t known whether or not to take the Cipro my travel doctor prescribed. People at Blue Morpho said, Ayahuasca will take care of it. So I didn’t take the Cipro. I also didn’t take my malaria medication. It seemed to me there were more mosquitoes in the Mississippi Valley. And anyway, for the purposes of the ceremonies it is best to have no medications in your system at all.
So my stomach’s still queasy this morning, but I’m hungry. Everything looks and tastes great. Giant avocado slices, beets, cucumbers, and tomato slices, all doused in lime juice. And the corn flakes with milk are soothing. I also eat a couple of eggs over easy. Later on I won’t be eating so much. In fact, with all the purging, “upper” and “lower,” it will begin to seem like, What’s the point?
MELODY SPIRITS
The day proceeds with ample question-and-answer sessions about the ceremonies, the Medicine, and Amazonian shamanism in general. More recommendations, too, about how to deal with fear. One suggestion is to thank the ayahuasca. Literally say, “Thank you, Ayahuasca” as you throw up or freak out. Gratitude will change your world. It’s also a response that happens to be congruent with the truth. Stay focused in your heart. Remember love. Focus on God. In the presence of darkness, say God, God, God, God…. Listen to the icaros, they will guide you.
Listening to the icaros can be like following threads out of hell into paradise, or at least in the direction of hope and comfort. The songs themselves are healing. They don’t always calm us, though — sometimes the intention is to radically shift us to new places. Sometimes these new places push the envelope of the comprehensible completely out of whack. This may not always feel like “medicine.” It can feel like a whole new kind of hell-madness. Or sometimes it feels funny, somebody chuckles and it becomes contagious, and it’s as if the room fills with a bunch of fireflies or carbonated bubbles.
Lovely and awe-inspiring as that first ceremony may have been, still it is a bit much to think of doing it all over again the next night. We already traveled infinity and it went on for so long! And now we’re doing it again? The apprentice Daniel said, “It always seems to me like a pretty good deal. You pay some money, drink the ayahuasca, and it goes on forever.” I had experienced that first ceremony somewhat like a Bruce Springsteen concert in 1980. Halfway through, you’re already completely satisfied, but Springsteen just keeps on going. Later I hear someone say, “Time sure flies when you’re not on ayahuasca!”
Just imagine doing anything that intense and strange five times within a space of nine days. It’s a hell of a lot of time spent in extremely altered states. Plus, between ceremonies, you never really come all the way back. It’s different for each person. One night, even when we didn’t have a ceremony, I woke up mareado and was up most of the night with another kind of visionary experience about the crucial importance of music in my life. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t had any ayhuasca to drink.
We were told that the physical substance of the Medicine and its immaterial spirits are not totally identical. Like everything else, ayahuasca is composed of spirits both light and dark. The shamans call in the medicine spirits and keep the others at bay. These spirits will stay in our system for six to twelve months after the ceremonies are over. Hamilton said that even mass-produced psychopharmaceuticals like SSRIs have spirits too — and what kinds of spirits are these, and who’s “directing traffic” among the dark and the light? No doctors I know ever sing songs to the little pills they hand out.
What makes these ceremonies different from a mushroom trip is the formal shamanic context — and the active (spiritual and physical) participation of the shamans and their icaros. These spirit songs are handed down from maestro to apprentice, but also each shaman receives his own icaros directly from plants and spirits in the course of his or her lifelong shamanic practice. The apprentice Mimi said Hamilton thinks he knows maybe five or six hundred different icaros, he isn’t sure. Those songs are like spirit forms from some vast reservoir in the medicine underworld, like rabbits out of a hat.
It’s stunning to realize all of this actually exists — the plants, the songs, the ceremonies, the vast Amazonian knowledge of these things that someone figured out about 40,000 years ago…
Like Walt Whitman said, “Have you reckoned the Earth much?”
THE SECOND CEREMONY
At 7:30 that evening we start gathering in the Ceremonial House. As we arrive we find our place on our mattress from the night before. Everything has been cleaned, refreshed, set up anew: Our helper friends are waiting there:
Blue Vomit Bucket.
Little White Enamel Cup.
Toilet Paper.
I’m a surprised to feel ready to do this all over again. Apprehensive, yes, but ready. Once again, I let Spirit decide. Once again, Spirit gives me a cup almost full — about three-quarters. Once again I drink, but this time it’s slightly more difficult to get down — such a strong, complicated taste.
And once again, after Hamilton’s invocation, as the singing and soft rhythmic music of the shakapas “shifts into gear” — the vomiting begins.
It’s somebody on my right.
And then someone on the far left, across the room, “hurls chowder” with a low visceral growl. At that moment, with a twinge of dread, I know it: This vomiting is different from last night. Last night it was human vomiting. Tonight this is darkness. This is demons coming out. This is way more intense. I can see the demons with my eyes closed. Reptilian colors. Amazing and scary. I’m throwing up too and it isn’t a bunch of shining jewels anymore. It’s a wrenching guttural wildness — as if Amazon vines grew everywhere in an instant, in and out of my throat.
The night before, whenever I’d feel the presence of darkness I could just wave it off — as the shamans had shown us — shooing black things away like cats — You can’t scare me! But this time darkness doesn’t leave so easily. It isn’t just a vapory feeling of dark curtains. It isn’t just shadows in the outer world. It’s darkness inside me too.
More reptilian demonic vomiting moves around the room like a plodding creature from person to person. Moaning and occasional weeping spread around in the dark — and the singing just casually carries on — and even that “carrying on” is almost horrifying somehow, this casualness of the icaros among the demons and fear and horror. Who knows how long it goes?
Eventually I find my way to one of the bathrooms in the back of the Ceremonial House. Unbelievable amounts of excrement, or whatever it is, come flushing out of me. It’s unreal that so much could still be in there — and I also hold a basin on my lap to vomit in — vomiting and shitting at the same time. It feels like stuff being drawn out of me. How could I have this much horror inside — and what’s worse, I can’t figure out the content of this darkness —what’s it even about? There are no associations with childhood traumas or bad memories or scary experiences. This seems to be some new kind of strangeness so unfamiliar it becomes increasingly intolerable to the point of overwhelming terror and… repulsion. Ugh…tarry, sticky black stuff clinging inside my psychological and emotional being. Later I thought, it’s like standing in your own bowel and witnessing the whole process — only this is a metaphysical bowel, and so unbearably awful I’m way beyond my ability to cope with it, crying out from my toilet seat, asking, finally asking for HELP from SOMEBODY! One of the assistants comes back, and the first thing I notice is the kindness in his voice. I ask for water poured over my head — this is another strategy we were told about if the experience becomes too much. I ask for More water, more water! I want this to stop. I keep saying, “I’m so tired, I’m tired, I’m tired!” Almost crying — I can hardly hear the icaros now, vines and snakes winding through me, and this angel guy pouring cool water over my head bowed over the vomit bucket, his hand helping the water along. I’m confused, baffled…“Who are you?”
“Danny.”
Oh, yeah, of course, the guy who serves our food, a great beautiful soul, a graceful effeminate guy. I’m practically sobbing with fear and Danny says softly, “It will pass. You have to be strong.” I can feel him smile in his voice, not with ridicule but kindness. He kisses me on the top of the head and disappears.
And with all that it does become more bearable. I begin to hear the icaros again. It’s as if my skull had been boiling and the water cooled it down, and Danny’s gentleness stabilized me and his “Be strong” woke me up to a certain dignity that comes with simply surviving.
But I don’t dare leave the toilet yet.
Surely I have shit and vomited everything I possibly can, but there’s still something in my gut. A kind of pressure. Not painful, but noticeable. Something. Spirit-colors and vines spiral around in elaborate display, spinning above my head and working through my body. I realize the ayahuasca is actually extracting this tarry black gunk from my body — and I remember to say “Thank you, Ayahuasca.” And whenever fear starts becoming too much again, I hear the words, my own voice saying, “Trust the Medicine.”
And I begin to trust. Simply by saying it I begin to trust this unbelievably horrifying strangeness. I begin to trust that whatever this black stuff is, it is being cleaned out by forces that care about us. And also, grotesque as it may seem, there’s something quite natural going on here. Physical, emotional, or metaphysical, it really is just “waste product” — and thank God there’s a way to start cleaning it out.
And then that pressure in my gut, after moving lower down, emerges as a wild sonorous fart. Long and drawn out, like a tuba blowing one note. But I soon realize this is the Weirdest Fart of My Life because it will not stop. And what can I do but keep listening, more and more amazed at the way it is totally taking its time, no rush to get it over with, completely shameless and “just so.” I imagine clocking it for the Guinness Book of World Records. And the fart just keeps coming. It has a personality too, like this gremlin, not big bad malicious, just a little demon-critter. If farts could be measured in length this one could easily be a mile long. It’s just mind-boggling. It goes on for so long it occurs to me I could probably harmonize with it — and I do. I improvise a sweet little ditty with the sustained tone of my own endless fart which actually isn’t me at all, it’s this gnarly little jester gremlin coming out.
After that, things don’t feel so out of control. I emerge from the bathroom feebly, wondering if anybody heard me singing with my fart, but also aware there are so many other things going on throughout the Ceremonial House. Now people are laughing too? The atmosphere in the room, the demonic mood, has shifted a bit. But then it gets ominous again, like a storm coming back, a dark wave — yet I’m not really panicking anymore. I’m exhausted and just dealing with it, maybe accepting it, but also, each time fear threatens to inundate, I remember “Trust the Medicine.”
And then Hamilton starts up one of the funniest most fun icaros of all. He vibrates his voice in this incredible way (sounding like multiple voices) Na Na Na Na Na Na Na — repeats that melody-chant four times, and then yells COURAGE! And after a few repetitions we get on the boat and we’re singing with him — yelling Courage! And I’ll be damned. We feel great, we feel full of, well, COURAGE! Hamilton’s a Jolly Roger Pirate singing his whole crew into the joy of our own fearlessness, herding our spirits to a better place! The shift from tarry sludge reptilian demonic madness to this brave new camaraderie and joy is hilarious and wild. We have gone from hell to laughter. We have been encouraged. It’s easy to remember that terror’s still just around the corner, but who cares? We’re on the high seas! And then Hamilton says, with affectionate slyness in his voice, with his psychedelic jazzman cool like a W.C. Fields showman — “It’s JUST a little ayahuasca….”
He says, “The Medicine helps us get rid of stuff — but you’ve got to see it on it’s way out. So…just say BYE BYE!” And we all yell back maniacally, “BYE BYE!” Don Alberto chuckles in the background, in his calm throaty way — as if from far up a river in the Amazon.
Which is where we are.
Later the apprentice Daniel says, “The ceremonies are so strange. I still can’t believe this is what I do.” (He used to be an engineer at Microsoft.)
Before going to sleep I write in my journal:
At one point it was clear to me: I do not want to be a shaman, at least not an ayahuascero — It is so foreign, so strange. It’s even too strange for me! (Thus we return to the boy from Missouri!) TRUST THE MEDICINE! Question: If this is the way reality is, where does that leave me? This is so weird — so extreme — yet Hamilton reminds us, “It’s all you” — and also — “SAY BYE-BYE!” The thing too, it was weird in unrecognizable ways. Makes me realize that “weirdness” for me has always fit within certain norms. And tonight this was all the way off the map. Hamilton said, “Love your life! Love your life.” This time he didn’t sound preachy to me. I needed his words like an icaros.
REALMS OF BROWN
In the course of the next six days we undergo three more ayahuasca ceremonies. They are neither as ecstatic as the first one nor as mind-bendingly terrifying as the second, but each ceremony contains trunks of precious “pirate treasure.” I call the third strange night, “Catatonic Brown, with Little Blue Windows (Encounters with Angels and the Dead Who Love Me).”
We’d had a night off since the terrifying second ceremony, and to rally ourselves for this third one a few of us sang a rousing “All You Need Is Love” at the top of our lungs. The ceremony has hardly begun when one of the participants starts yelling or howling. He howls for over an hour straight, possibly longer, yelling at demons that apparently got him in Africa, releasing poisons one can only imagine. After enduring this, sometimes finding it funny (even he laughs), sometimes horrifying (his battle is real), and sometimes just plain overwhelmingly relentless (as if in hell there is no horizon at which any of us will ever arrive), I find myself locked in a kind of catatonic “brownness.”
I’m not panicking, but can’t really move. Within this paralyzed state I begin thinking again of my friend Mark Clarke. Then I realize this isn’t just a memory any longer but his actual presence. Whoa. He tells me he’s been watching over me for years. During the second ceremony when I was sitting on the toilet terrified I had tried to ask for God’s help — a really difficult task to concentrate on when you’re “scared shitless.” Eventually, in the upper right corner of my perception I sensed a kind of whitish light which felt like it might be Christ — but nothing clear — as if shining through chunks of milky glass. Now Mark Clarke is telling me, “That wasn’t Christ, it was the Archangel Michael.” This is kind of surprising since I’ve never thought much about the Archangel Michael. Mark Clark tells me I can call on Michael in times of need and he’ll be there.
I then experience intermittent waves of fear as various unnerving experiences unfold. For example, at one point ropy “snakes” are being extracted up out of the back of my neck and suddenly one jerks into a noose — a visual and physical sensation that had already startled me several times earlier that day. It occurs to me that each time some new scary thing begins to manifest I’m actually being given an opportunity to call on the angel for help, to put into practice what Mark Clark just told me. So I try it out and, sure enough, every time I call for help, Michael shows up and his protective presence calms me down. Never a clear image of a literal angel, but more like a giant white rosebud, luminous, ten feet tall.
Later Mark tells me he’s been watching over me all these years until I finally made this connection with Michael, and now his task is complete. My heart fills with gratitude and I thank him as he goes away, and I’m just amazed that any of this is taking place. From another angle it becomes clear that, in a way, “Mark Clark” in my psyche has been a version of the Archangel Michael all along.
That night I experience other encounters with dead people, including my grandfather who wants me to bring a message to my Dad. My great grandmother’s been watching over me too. Also somebody from another century in a Little Bo Peep outfit. And every once in a while I see little squares or mosaics of blue — as if coming from the other side of this heavy, all-encompassing BROWNNESS. Tonight is remarkably different from either of the two previous ceremonies. After the ceremony officially ends, I remain on my mattress a long time, completely lethargic and immobile. Daniel comes around to check on me.
“Everything’s brown,” I tell him, “I can’t really move.”
He nods. “Sounds like you’re having what we call the Poop Browns.” He says, “It’s just another form of release, a slow purge.” This time I don’t really mind other people around me talking and joking after the ceremony. Laughing helps somewhat dis-assemble the oppressing heaviness. Zany talk about the “rose-breasted gross beak, a medium-sized bird.” Suddenly I wonder about Mike who’s over to my right.
“Mike, what’s your middle name?”
“Me?”
“Yeah.”
“Roland.”
Something about that name catches me, and I’m thinking about it.
Mike says, “I don’t think I’ve every revealed that to anyone before.”
I say, “Row land?”
“Yeah, Roland.”
“No, I mean, ROW LAND.”
“What? You mean like rowing?”
“Yes, rowing on the land — ROW LAND!”
Laughter, then periods of silence…. A weird new insect sound begins just outside the screen. It’s a dry wooden clicking sound, but different from a cicada. Something we never hear in North America. From within my strange state I have an indefinable yet precise understanding of how to make a sound very much like that — kind of like the NG chant you can do up high in your nostrils, in the upper roof of the throat. At any rate, I begin harmonizing with the invisible Amazonian insect in the weirdest way — There’s this double or triple resonance between us that seems to loosen the sutures of my skull…
“Do you hear that?”
“What is that?”
“I think it’s… Steve.”
POSSESSED BY A GRASPING OBSERVER
Ceremony #4. We had been encouraged to set an intention before each ceremony and this time as I drink the ayahuasca the question “What is my work?” comes into focus. I am given a lot of information about healing. I later call this fourth ceremony Lessons about Healing (Which I Can’t Remember Because ‘You’ll Know It By Heart.’)
One thing stands out for now: Half of healing is simply about FLUSHING: Flush out the toxic with the good. (This is what I’m witnessing as it’s happening.) With each ceremony I’m able to experience more clearly the spirits of the ayahuasca doing what amounts to house cleaning of body and soul. Imagery shifts from being permeated by vines and snakes (which Daniel calls “the Roto-Rooter spirits”) to witnessing Tendril People (who later manifest as Elves) simply going about their happy business of cleaning me up. That incongruous tone, again, of casual and ordinary goings-on. One may wonder if I’m hallucinating out of my mind, but I can see that, in fact, this is really the way it all works.
The first ceremony had been charged with Pachamama energy — this vast and ample planetary spirit of ours. Gaia is a good name too, but “Pachamama” carries the weight and tone of a magnificent “Mama Drum” at the center of it all. I felt that first night how the ayahuasca medicine from vines and trees was a gift from the Earth itself, and that she offers many many gifts, more than we realize.
My usual point of view, based on what I see around me, is that the Earth is doomed, thanks to the greed, ignorance, and carelessness of humanity. But that point of view got permanently changed when she conveyed to me something like, “The question is not if the Earth will be destroyed but whether or not human beings will let themselves receive the healing that Earth is offering.” I understood this to mean everything from healing plants and icaros to a simple walk in the woods. Earthly beauty. The healing is readily available if we make ourselves available to it. I was shown that even if parts of the Earth seem to be dying, other parts remain vitally alive: energetically raw, powerful, far more impervious than human races and poisons can penetrate. During a question-and-answer session with don Alberto, with Hamilton translating, I had asked Alberto if he feels like the Amazon is ecologically endangered. (It sure looks that way through the eyes of Google Earth.) Alberto’s answer couldn’t have been more brief: “No.”
So by the fourth ceremony my focus on healing has accumulated a head of steam and my intention now is to watch and learn as much as possible. As the Medicine takes hold, I’m trying to remember everything, but there is so much I’m coming across — imagery, ideas, implications, colors, icaros…. As I try harder and harder to keep up with it all, something begins to happen that never happened in any of the other ceremonies: my usually steadfast observer mind begins to lose its bearings!
The interesting thing about ayahuasca up to that point was that I had been able to witness everything fairly calmly and clearly — even while terrified! — and I’d begun to take this reflective capacity for granted. But now the Medicine is infiltrating the observer mind itself, not just the contents I am observing but the Observer himself. I see how my effort to take hold of all the information compressed in this ayahuasca experience is racing faster in a frenzy of grasping reflection but never quite catching up with the ongoing phenomenon itself, and actually, the harder the Observer tries to memorize, the more separated from direct experience I become. I’m a hamster in a wheel and it’s futile! The Observer is defeating itself, and I can see that but I can’t stop. This is scary in a whole new way. (“Thank you, Ayahuasca!”) This observer part of my mind that I very much rely on is no longer in my control. And yet in its exaggerated state I begin to see how the mind too is a kind of spirit that needs trimming, like a gas flame, to keep the observer balanced with what is being observed. Which is to say, really, you have to let some or even most of the observable go, because the observer can only take in so much, and “trying” actually constricts what you’re able to take in. I was being shown how the observer or reflective part of the mind can itself become a demon. Thus I finally hear a voice that says, “You don’t need to remember what we’re teaching you because you’ll know it by heart.”
***
I am telling you some of the content of these experiences, but keep in mind that the form, the exact process of what happened is almost completely indescribable. Physical sensations varied from ceremony to ceremony, visual and auditory sensations too. I’m putting essences into words, but these words are like a few bits of stem and twig from a jungle stretching all the way to the horizon. I was in an almost constant interweave of music and colors and strange forms in constant transformation, shapes with different personalities, different energies which are also spirits — or spirits which are really just “energies.” I was taught that you can be healed without necessarily knowing every nook and cranny of the process, and that psychological insight is really only a very small part of healing.
In the world of shamanism, battles between good and evil, light and dark, are ongoing and ever-present. Just because you’re a shaman doesn’t mean you’re free of these struggles. As you advance in the knowledge, battles simply resume at the next level or in a new way. I felt liberated by how, as Hamilton said, shamans in the Amazon do not feel a need to differentiate between literal realities, dreams, or visionary realities. They just say, “This happened….” Thus we are always in the realm of story, regardless of whether that story can be documented on video or exists in a person’s own mind. Storytelling is a huge part of the healing and teaching that come through visionary plants and shamanic activities. Even as I convey some of my ceremony experiences right now, an inevitable sort of mistranslation occurs in the gap between the ineffable reaches of “everything that happened” and this little story I manage to put into words.
HEART CLEANING
The final ceremony is centered on cleaning the Heart. My legs tremble for hours while “judgment of others” and “chronic discontent” are drawn out through the soles of my feet. This is not scary at all, but curious, because once again there has been no precedent for this kind of physical releasing during any of my previous ceremonies. And yet, by now I seem to have a clearer understanding of what is happening, even if it’s never happened before. My heart is being worked on. Cheerful elves gently remove brown sooty stuff like layers of dead skin from around my heart. It reminds me of carefully peeling skin off a burn victim, as if the actual meat of my heart has been through fire.
As the final ceremony winds down, it becomes apparent that this strange medicine work with ayahuasca has only just begun, with words on a cinema marquee crossing my perceptual field: TO BE CONTINUED…
One more thing. During the fourth “you’ll know it by heart” ceremony, Deborah Jean poked through the visual layers and made her unmistakable presence known for a moment, and then after that she sifted in and out intermittently. She’s that friend of Vikki’s and mine who first introduced us in 1991 and then died two months later. I got the sense she wasn’t going to be available much longer and wanted to speak with me soon. Some urgency on her part. I had been hoping this final ceremony would be an opportunity to converse with her more fully, like my interchange with Mark Clark. However, there are so many people around me talking at the end of the ceremony that I can’t concentrate. This leaves me with the feeling of something important I need to somehow follow up on when I get back home.
I leave the Ceremonial House and sit up a long time, late into the Amazonian night, writing and drawing, following my mind’s “tendrils” — and it comes to me that my friend Jim Angell has drowned! The idea is disturbing, so I start thinking, “Well, maybe he’s drowning in sorrow.” I send him my prayers. I don’t know what else to do.
A month and a half later Jim calls me at the exact moment I am writing a letter to him describing all this. I tell him about the “drowning” message, laughing it off as a bit of hallucinated weirdocity, but a bit later he brings it up again. He figured out that at the moment I was receiving that message about him “drowning” he had been on a boat to China — on the job as a diplomatic courier. As he stood alone at the ship’s rail looking out at nothing but ocean as far as the eye could see, suddenly he was gripped with an overwhelming terror. He said “it was like being swallowed up in Infinity.” He had to go inside. He said it made him understand why sailors typically don’t go out at all unless they have a specific task to focus on, like painting the deck or something. They seem to know what you just can’t look at for too long.
GOOD BYE
The morning after our final ceremony, we say goodbye to the shamans and board wooden busses back to Iquitos, still altered in various ways. A number of shaky occurrences among the sellers and citizens of this “wild west” Amazonian town make me realize how vulnerable we still are.
And it can also be said that the Doors of Perception feel cleansed.
And that the centrality of the Heart has never been clearer or stronger.
And that the world of the spirits cannot be ignored.
And so, from Iquitos, where that burned airliner still adorns the runaway, to Lima. And from Lima, across Ecuador and Columbia at night…with miracle stars out there beyond the plane’s hard hull…
And from drowsiness to deep oblivion…
And from oblivion to dawn, when “inner elves” call me from sleep so I won’t miss all these beautiful pinkish rose elfish clouds down below over the Caribbean.
And then we’re landing in Newark, New Jersey!
EPILOGUE: A SECOND AMAZON
Less than 24 hours after a final Amazon breakfast in the thatch-roofed Main House at Blue Morpho, I’m back in Croton on Hudson, New York. It’s June 4. My vision feels clearer and crisper. Things look beautiful here. Alive. At age 15, Philip is a wonderful listener as I tell my tales of spirits, icaros, and the Vine of Death. He seems to delight in the strangeness of it all. At day’s end I’m writing, “I feel lighter. I wonder what’s going to happen next.” I hear a spirit voice say, “Be patient. Be present when the Teaching comes.”
And I feel grateful. I don’t know what this “Teaching” is, but I have not felt so enriched, calm, and satisfied for a long time.
Even when I go back to my teaching work at the prison I still feel the ayahuasca in me — that sense of cleansed perception, of lucidity and presence, of living on a planet that is real, alive. Day after day I write about my experiences, exploring new ideas, refining perceptions, wondering how I will ever integrate so much. There’s something in me moving toward fresh regions of the Heart, as if entering a new territory of my own vitality and tenderness.
In fact, however, the “shock and awe” of transformation have hardly even begun. Three weeks after my return from Peru, Philip’s mother commits suicide with a rope. There’s no pulse when her husband Pete finds her, though the EMTs are able to bring her partly back.
***
The next eight days unfold like another set of surreal ceremonies, but in entirely different surroundings — Vikki in bed being breathed by the ventilator with it’s soft shooshing sound, Pete at the watch, Philip folding paper cranes and reading to her — and each of us at times speaking aloud to this “woman fallen asleep.” That was how Vikki had described Deborah Jean when she found her body in 1991.
Now Vikki was the sleeping one. Here was an ocean too vast and remote to conceive. Sometimes I would sing to her, as if the right “icaro” might wake her up. Phelp’s Hospital in Sleepy Hollow seemed eerily like a new kind of medicine world, parallel to the one I had just come from in Peru. Amid our horror, self-blame and overwhelming sadness, Luminous Ones shone through in haggard staff and family faces that also smiled, and in stories of Vikki’s love and humor, as well as her demons. There was a moment when Philip, confronting the thoughtlessness of his elders for not including him in decisions about the care of his own mother, seemed ten feet tall, blazing with light.
Or was that the Archangel?
When they finally turned off the ventilator, Philip held Vikki’s hand, whispering to her as her pulse faded. A day and a half later this fifteen year-old boy, our son, lifted shovelfuls of earth to bury his mom, and when people offered to help, he refused. He would not let the shovel go.
Like a kind of forecast, that first ayahuasca ceremony showed me a place where I am already at peace with Vikki. Even as my own tumult drags on, and my fear for Philip, I know that place of peace exists. But Philip’s journey has just begun. The hospital and the cemetery were Philip’s ayahuasca, his own ceremonies far more intense than mine, more than he can speak, and with more to come.
Three months later Pete killed himself too.
Philip and I are still alive.
TO BE CONTINUED…
