Toward the end of this material, Graham reports his
encounter with a hateful presence brought about by a ‘shaman’ that had infiltrated
his group and brought serious distress into the group. This appears to be a rare event and likely
brought about by misled individuals who are possibly dreaming of power. Thus it is a warning. We can wait until a class of shamans sort
themselves out who practice humility and skill as well.
What we do know is that this is plausibly our most important
drug for dealing with mental illness of all kinds and that it needs to be
tested and carefully mastered. It is no
joke.
It also gives me serious hope that we can banish all mental
illness and even the lingering effects of physical brain trauma.
Graham Hancock is doing an excellent job of reporting on these experiences and gathering information.
CRAPPY AYAHUASCA SHAMANS ARE MAKING GAP YEARS
DANGEROUS
By Michael Allen Apr
30 2014
Last week, 19-year-old
Henry Miller – a gap-year student from Bristol – died in Colombia after taking
part in a shamanic ceremony. The papers are reporting that he died after
drinking a “drug” called yage,
which is actually just another name for ayahuasca, a plant that – among South
America’s indigenous tribes – is brewed with another plant called chacruna and
used in shamanic rituals for its apparent healing properties.
Reports on the healing
experience vary. Some people will tell you it was the most mind-blowing
transcendental experience of their lives. Others will say it was a prolonged
and slightly trippy vomiting session.
However, a more sinister
element of the ayahuasca tourism industry has grown to meet a recent boom in
the number of young Westerners travelling to South America for a trip. As reported by
Motherboard last year, "slimy pseudo shamans" – untrained
opportunists who've merely taken crash courses in ayahuasca delivery – had
begun operating in Peru, hooking people up with wildly exorbitant and dangerous
doses to make a quick buck. Writing for Men's Journal, the journalist Kelly Hearn reports that since
2011, two French pilgrims and a Californian 18-year-old have died at ayahuasca
lodges, while a German woman was apparently beaten and raped by two men who'd
given her ayahuasca.
To try to find out a
little more, I spoke to Robert Tindall, an ayahuasca expert and the author of
two books on shamanism, The
Jaguar That Roams the Mind and The Shamanic Odyssey: Homer, Tolkien, and the Visionary Experience.
Robert
Tindall
VICE: Hey Robert. First off,
did you hear about the British teenager who died in Colombia? Ayahuasca isn’t
generally known to be that dangerous, right?
Robert Tindall: What I read on the internet is that this young man was probably given a brew containing toé, which is a member of the datura family. It’s a very potent hallucinogen.
Would you ever use toé in
one of your ayahuasca sessions?
Oh my god, I won’t touch it. You can go away and never come back. The European analogues are mandrake, henbane, deadly nightshade – all those plants in the medieval witches' brew. It’s very powerful stuff.
Why are tourists falling
victim to these supposed shamans?
It used to be that it took about at least 20 years to really apprentice as a shaman, and now there are people claiming they are shamans within two or three years. There’s no quality control – there’s no knowledge of lineage – so Westerners go online, see “Amazonian retreats” and It doesn’t even occur to them to enquire who the shaman is, what his lineage is, whether he has recommendations… it doesn’t even occur to them. It seems to be a Disneyland mentality.
It’s a set-up for
disaster, because with all these naïve people bringing money in,
there’s an explosion of people setting up centres, making brews of different
levels of quality – people without expertise. People are going to keep dying as
long as this goes on.
So what’s the proper way
to take ayahuasca?
We do extensive interviews with people before we take them to the Amazon [for ayahuasca retreats]; we go over their medical history, we’re with them working with them on their healing. We take them there to work on their healing within the vegetalista [shamans who use plants to make their cures]. If ayahuasca would be good for them in their healing process, they’ll drink ayahuasca – but if it’s not, they won’t. We follow up when we get back, because you have to.
What does the actual
ritual itself involve?
Everyone will sit in a circle. They’ll make prayers at the beginning, people will drink, they’ll sit back and everyone will start to sing and people will start having visions at some point. If everything’s going well, the shaman will direct the ceremony so everyone has good healings and visions in the ceremony. Then the shaman and the assistant will take everybody out, and everybody goes to bed and has sweet dreams.
Some shamans sing songs
that can actually put things in a person’s psyche if their minds are
undefended, or if you don’t know how to defend yourself. There are enchanting
songs that don’t heal; there are bewitching songs that don’t free. You only
learn these things after being down there for quite a while. You begin
discerning.
How can people tell if an
ayahuasca ceremony is genuine or not?
On the surface, it may not look that different. It really takes time to discern what’s the real deal and what’s not. If we just watch the way someone walks into the room and talks about the medicine – or the way they introduce themselves to you – you know pretty quick whether they’re the real deal or not.
How many times have you
drank ayahuasca yourself?
How many times? So many times that I lost count long ago. I view it now as an adaptogen – it helps you adapt to the constantly changing conditions of evolution. It keeps you on your toes. I grew up on the streets in California and I had some very serious addiction issues and a lot of anger with my family, and ayahuasca has helped me tremendously in overcoming that. I’m a different man after using it for ten years as a plant ally.
You grew up on the
streets?
Yeah, my mum needed to leave me in an orphanage when I was nine. My creaky middle-class existence just shattered and I got dropped into the criminal class. By the time I was 15 I was drinking so hard that I was waking up in prison, not remembering how I got there. I was out to kill myself with alcohol. I had no family. I had no reason to live. But I had a blessed experience with psychedelic mushrooms here in California, which broke my addiction to alcohol pretty well when I was 16 and it saved my life.
I was at a party and all
my friends were lying on the floor, tripping to Jimmy Hendrix, and I was
standing in the doorway with a bottle of liquor in my hand. I suddenly had a
flash of myself and I suddenly said to everyone: “This is me, the guy looking
in.” I saw at that moment that I was going to die in the gutter, that I was
perfectly content to. Then, about two weeks later, I realised that I had lost
my need to get seriously drunk. The suicidal element disappeared.
A
shaman preparing ayahuasca (Photo courtesy of Robert Tindall)
Describe the first time
you took ayahuasca.
I discovered ayahuasca, I guess, in my late thirties, and I had done many years of Zen Buddhist training at that point. The psychedelics had actually led me to Buddhism. I entered a Zen temple when I was 19 and trained there as a monk with utmost sincerity. I was prepared. I had done years of meditation. I had done some quite sincere therapy as well, and so my soul was on the brink of communing with the wisdom of this plant.
The first time was in a
little place up in the mountains here in California. A Peruvian shaman had come
over. The guy was crazy as a lark, but luck was with me that day. I’d never
drink with that man again, though. He was crazy.
How did it feel when the
ayahuasca took effect?
I think what people generally experience is that it’s kind of like going into a waking dream, and what happens is you pass through a kind of threshold where you may be having unusual dreams, you may be hearing something, you may be seeing geometrical patterns. You might hear a song that catches you. You just don’t know how it could happen. And then you find yourself in a deeper visionary state after that, and what you find there is just like how you don’t know what you’re going to dream tonight when you go to sleep – it’s the same thing with ayahuasca.
You can set the intention
of a ceremony, you can create conditions under which healing will occur. There
are a lot of things you can do, but when you get into that visionary realm it’s
always mysterious, it’s always wonderful. That particular night, I experienced
being transformed into a jaguar. For myself, even now, I can be in ceremony and
I will suddenly just make the metamorphosis, and I’ll be sitting there and my
skull will become feline – I can feel my eyes are a cat, and I have the mind of
a cat.
You turned into a cat?
That’s fairly out there. Is that a normal experience?
Transformation into other animals, other plants and other beings is a fairly common experience with ayahuasca. What I needed to break through my ego shell at that point was a powerful influx of energy, and, my god, did that jaguar bring it. Ayahuasca seems to like boas and jaguars. Some people may experience actually becoming a jaguar and going off into the jungle and checking it out. People actually scout – they go out and discover things in the jungle they didn’t know about.
So what are the benefits
of drinking ayahuasca properly, besides turning into a jaguar?
There are some things that this medicine is far better at working with than Western technological medicine, and we could really stand to benefit from a good relationship with it. But as long as we keep treating it as the next exciting drug to experience, we’re headed in the direction of what happened with LSD. We’re only starting to recuperate from the draconian crackdown on the use of LSD, which is also an amazing therapeutic agent, so what’s going on is deeply concerning, and I’m not surprised at all to hear what’s happened with this young man.
It’s a wonderful plant,
but we’re caught in this situation right now where we’ve begun approaching it
as a drug.
Okay, thanks Robert.
Letters From the Far Side of Reality
By Graham Hancock
These five letters,
originally written as status updates for my facebook community (here and here) describe a series of sessions with
Ayahuasca, the “Vine of Souls” that I participated in in Brazil in January and
February 2013. They are written in real time and reflect the changing dynamics
of these unusual experiences over a period of two weeks. Something very strange
happened in sessions four and five, something sinister that I could not have
anticipated from my previous work with
Ayahuasca and looking back through the whole sequence of letters now I am
struck by how it took me, and others, by surprise and how we at first sought to
intellectualize it and even explain it away.
Letter 1, Friday 25 January
2013
Santha and I are in Brazil
after a long flight cramped up in the back of a British Airways 747. The seats
seem to have been designed like the medieval torture called “Little Ease” where
it is impossible to find comfort in any position. I’m due to have my right hip
replaced in April and spent the 12-hour journey in something approaching
excruciating pain. What a relief to arrive into the Brazilian summer and be
able to stretch my legs!
Now we’re at the retreat
where I had the extraordinary experiences in October 2011 that I describe in my
article Giving up the Green
Bitch: Reflections on Cannabis, Ayahuasca and the Mystery of Plant Teachers –
see here: http://www.grahamhancock.com/forum/HancockG3.php.
In the coming weeks, together with a group of a dozen other people and our
facilitator (who resists being called a shaman despite his enormous depth of
experience), we will participate in a series of Ayahuasca sessions. As well as
drinking the sacred Amazonian brew, and learning the lessons it has to teach me
this time around, I will be presenting several talks to the group on various aspects
of my work. The other presenter here is the renowned ethnopharmacologist Dennis
McKenna, brother of the late, great Terence McKenna. I first got to know Dennis
well during a lecture tour that we did together in Australia last year and am
looking forward to renewing the acquaintance and to the further deep connection
that shared journeys with Ayahuasca always bring. If you haven’t read it yet I
urge you to get hold of a copy of Dennis’s new book, The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss,
about his life with his remarkable brother Terence, see here
So yesterday, Friday 24
January, we rested, relaxed and recovered from the long flights we’d
all made to get here (the other participants come from as far afield as the
Middle East, Australia, and the US). Today, Saturday 25 January, the work
begins with the first all-night Ayahuasca session. I have some trepidation – as
Dennis puts it anyone who approaches deep work with Ayahuasca without at least
some trepidation doesn’t really know the brew. But I have made a sincere effort
since October 2011 to implement the changes in my life and outlook that Mother
Ayahuasca required of me. I’m hoping to be handled gently this time and to
experience beautiful visions, healing, inspiration and love.
Above all love.
That, I know from long
experience, is the essence of the intelligence behind the vine.
I’ll report back tomorrow.
Letter 2, Saturday 26
January 2013
So, Santha and I are in
Brazil for a series of sessions with Ayahuasca, the sacred visionary brew of
the Amazon. “Ayahuasca” means “the Vine of the Dead” or “the Vine of Souls.” It
is given this name for a number of very good reasons. One is that it can allow
the experience of contact with those who have passed on. I make no claims here
as to the reality status of that experience, although I do have an opinion.
Another is that aspects of it are so similar to some of the well-known features
of the near-death experience, notably a life-review, that some feel it may
provide us with a dress-rehearsal for death itself and for whatever we may
encounter when we pass beyond the veil. Again, while I have my own opinion I
make no specific claims here as to the “reality” of such experiences. I give
some further thoughts on this in my article Giving up the Green Bitch, linked in Letter 1
.
Last night’s session was
very mild, and for many in the group it was not visionary at all. This is
sometimes the case with Ayahuasca; one should not go into a session with
expectations of seamlessly convincing and overwhelming visions. Often the brew
will give you these, but not always, and not reliably. Last night, however,
there was an additional factor of uncertainty and this was that the maestros
had provided a new batch of the brew that they believed to be very strong and
which was indeed thicker and more syrupy than the brew we normally drink here
in Brazil. It reminded me in its consistency of the very concentrated brew,
sometimes with bits of plant matter floating in it, usually offered by Peruvian
shamans (where, accordingly, rather small cups – about 25 mililiters -- are the
norm). At our Brazilian retreat on the other hand it is the practise to offer a
less concentrated brew but in larger doses and in past visits here I have
frequently drunk cups of 100 or 150 and sometimes even 200 mililiters.
Because last night’s brew
was new, and was said to be strong, our facilitator proposed cups of just 25
mililiters or less for each of us and we would then discover its strength, or
otherwise, for ourselves. If it was not as strong as expected we could always
drink a “booster” cup after an hour and a half or so.
The effect was not strong
and after 90 minutes almost the entire group queued up for a booster, again of
25 mililiters. Still in my case this had no – or almost no – effect and I began
to contemplate a third cup. This is not an exact science and it is never good
to be too eager with Ayahuasca. In other words you can go for a booster after
experiencing no effect with the first cup only to discover that it was merely
slow kicking in and that suddenly, with the booster, you have had more than you
want. So I waited a while but when it was clear I was still not entering the
Ayahuasca realm I did go for a third cup. So three cups, each of 25 mililiters,
making 75 mililiters in total.
There was no purging – i.e.
(apologies for being graphic) neither I nor anyone else in the group vomited
last night. This is most unusual although I have found as the years go by that
I do purge far less than I used to when I started out. But within half an hour
of drinking my third small cup I did gradually begin to enter visionary space.
These visions were mild, and a little “flat” or two-dimensional by comparison
with other fully-immersive visions I have experienced in the past. The visions
were of intricate geometrical and cursive patterns presented as though on
separate individual cards, but when I studied each card the patterns proved to
be in movement and resolved into the forms of entities, rather scary in
appearance, and I felt somewhat menaced. Go to Google Images, search “Codex
Borgia” and/or “Codex Nuttal” and you may get some inkling of the atmosphere,
if not the exact details, of these images. I felt myself to be in the presence
of intelligence and I tried to focus on that intelligence, rather than be
repelled by the menacing images and in due course moved on to the next stage of
the journey in which I was filled by powerful feelings of empathy and
compassion for my fellow human beings.
These feelings began with
reflections on the other members of our group who I had begun to get to know,
and whose stories I had heard, over the past two days. Often in my daily life I
become absorbed selfishly in my own immediate worries and concerns, certain
problems and issues that are confronting me which seem to loom large, and
matters that are causing me emotional or spiritual pain. I am incredibly
privileged and live a blessed life yet still I find reasons to feel victimised
or hard done by and sorry for myself! In an instant last night I was shown how
ridiculous and self-indulgent and uncalled-for such feelings are as I reflected
on what I knew of the difficulties and challenges, and real worries and pain
that members of our group, in their own ways are confronting bravely and
without complaint in their own lives. I thought of some cases in particular,
the strength, the dignity, the good will, the cheerfulness in adversity, of
certain individuals, and I felt myself brimming over with compassion and love
and admiration for them. And it came home to me in a real and immediate way
that each one of us here on earth, not only the members of the immediate group
surrounding me in the Ayahuasca session, but every one of the billions of my
fellow humans going through this incarnation in this time are bright and
luminous individual flames of light – each with his or her own special
gifts and
creativity and imagination, each with his or her own strengths and weaknesses –
and every one of us faces challenges and difficulties, and ordeals and pain and
is confronted daily by defining choices, some small, some momentous, that write
the pages of the stories of our lives.
And the only right response
is gratitude, gratitude, gratitude to the universe for working the high magic
that has made it possible for us to travel the path of human experience, and to
learn and grow and develop in the process, and to practise love.
Letter 3, Wednesday 30
January 2013
This is the third of my
series of letters about the Ayahuasca sessions I’m presently participating in
here in Brazil. Ayahuasca is a visionary brew that marries leaves containing
dimethyltryptamine (DMT) with a monamine oxidase inhibitor contained in the
Ayahuasca vine itself; these two primary ingredients are cooked together in
water to produce a foul-tasting but highly psychoactive beverage that has been
drunk for at least three millennia by the indigenous peoples of the Amazon
rainforest who value it as a portal to the spirit world. In the past decade it
has begun to acquire a global reputation and has been described as “twenty
years of psychotherapy in one night.”
So our second session took
place on the night of Monday 28 January into the small hours of Tuesday 29
January. This time I drank 80 mililitres of the brew in a single cup – as
against three doses of 25 mililitres each on the previous session. With too small
a dose of Ayahuasca it is perfectly possible to have no experience at all; with
too large a dose it is possible to have an experience that is completely
overwhelming – perhaps far more so that you would like. It is not an exact
science and it is complicated further by differences in one’s own body
chemistry from day to day that can result in widely varying effects.
I’m here together with a
group of more than a dozen people and, as in previous retreats for serious work
with Ayahuasca that I’ve participated in over the last ten years it is
noticeable how close and trusting of one another we have become. The Ayahuasca
experience has a very special way of doing this – of opening the heart and
breaking down barriers so that you feel intense empathy and a deep connection
with others at a level that is near to impossible in the often angry, often
competitive, frequently loveless hustle and bustle and grind of daily life. It
is a great privilege to be able to know this empathy and connection and reminds
me that all of life could be like this should we consciously set out and be
willing to do the work make it so. It is not oil, or water, or mineral
deposits, or food, or land, or any other economic resource that is truly scarce
or precious or “running out” in this bountiful Earth of ours. What we are short
of as a global species, what we seem reluctant to manifest, what we are failing
to express and act out, is simply love, and in a way this should be the easiest
problem in the world for us to solve – for it is within the capacity and the
power of each and every one of us to give love if we choose to do so.
It is SUCH a good feeling
just to lay down the barriers of suspicion and fear and self interest and trust
others completely and know that the trust is shared and that the love you put
out is the love you get back.
So, we all gathered round
and raised our cups, mine containing 80 mililitres of Ayahuasca, and thanked
the spirits and the ancestors for giving us this blessing, and drank. I then
went to the bathroom and washed the acrid taste of the brew from my mouth
before sitting down on my mattress with my back propped against the wall of our
large ceremonial room surrounded by the rest of our group. Our facilitator
turned off the lights, and put on a CD of the sounds of nature – the ocean,
rainfall, birdcalls – and through the open windows came a soft, cooling breeze.
Stillness descended like a blessing and for the next half hour or so we all
simply sat there staring into the darkness, thinking our thoughts. It is best to
sit up at first – some prefer to sit up the whole night – as it allows swifter
and more efficient digestion of the brew than can be achieved lying down.
Nausea and vomiting commonly accompany the consumption of Ayahuasca but it is a
really good idea not to purge for at least an hour to allow full absorption of
the medicine from the gut into the bloodstream. Vomit before the hour is up and
you will likely need to drink some more brew.
Mercifully as I have become
more experienced with Ayahuasca during the past ten years I find that I vomit
less and less, and usually not at all – although I do still suffer episodes of
nausea.
After 45 minutes I felt I
was ready to lie down and stretched out on my mattress. Music is a constant
accompaniment of our sessions here – the facilitator sensing intuitively the
needs and mood and individual journeys of the members of the group and
adjusting the playlist and his own instrumentals and vocals accordingly. He
practices within the Peruvian, Shipibo tradition (though these ceremonies are
taking place in Brazil) and at the point where I lay down he had begun to sing
a series of Icaros (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icaro), traditional
songs that provide an excellent waveguide into the profound meditative state
that Ayahuasca can bring, or, equally Ariadne’s threads that can help to lead
us out of labyrinths we might prefer not to find ourselves in.
These days I rarely go into
an Ayahuasca session without some fear and this has much to do with a
terrifying session on pure (smoked) DMT that I had in the United States in 2011
(described here: http://www.grahamhancock.com/forum/HancockG3.php).
The Ayahuasca experience is not the same as the DMT experience, even though DMT
is the primary active ingredient of Ayahuasca, but sometimes a strong Ayahuasca
journey will plunge me squarely back into what I think of as DMT space. I feel
vulnerable there, sometimes unprotected by the kindly, healing spirit of the
vine, and my fear derives from this sense of raw exposure to elemental
intelligences.
I suppose an hour had
passed when I first became definitely aware of the effects of the brew in the
form of intense visuals, seen best (even in the darkness) with my eyes closed.
They took shape at first, as they often do, as swirling patterns of deep,
richly-saturated colours, but almost from the first moment they had the
slightly menacing undertones of my 2011 DMT trip. How can I describe them?
Patches of colour all joined to one another, here purple, here ochre, here a
strange, deep brownish-red, here a luminescent green, here blue – each patch
about the size of a human hand and shaped into oblique, rhomboidal geometric
forms, and all joined together in a meaningful swirling dance. This was not
simply the entertaining pattern flow of a kaleidoscope. The patterns radiated
intelligence, sentience, intent, and I felt my fear rise up another notch and
at the same time I exercised my will and said to myself “I will not be afraid;
I will journey into this without hesitation and see where it leads me.” As soon
as I had made that decision I felt my fear subside and I journeyed deeper and
then, emerging from the patterns, and shaped out of them, appeared the
beautiful, glittering, sinuous form of a serpent seeming to radiate compassion
and concern for me and I sensed the presence of the great spirit, mother
goddess of our planet, who I think of as Mother Ayahuasca, and I felt her
healing energy. She worked on me for some time, swirling around my body, fixing
parts of me that were broken, right down to the deepest level of my DNA and of
my psyche.
At this point it was all
extremely gentle. I saw faces I did not recognize. A great bird, a raptor of
some kind, took wing amidst a nimbus of supernal light. The serpent became a
jaguar. And still I was not afraid and I began to think – well, this is going
to be fine. My 80 mililitre cup was just right, just enough to enter healing visionary
space but not so much that the visions would overwhelm me and swallow me up.
And as is often the case with Ayahuasca the visions came and went in waves –
sometimes quite intense, sometimes falling away almost to nothingness.
I drifted into thoughts about
my relationship with my wife Santha, how I am so blessed to have her in my
life, how she is in fact a goddess who manifests in human form and how
incredibly privileged I am that she permits me to go through this incarnation
with her and learn from her how to be a better human being. And I realized how
so much of our life together has been very selfishly about ME, about my work,
my creativity, my concerns, and it was brought home to me with the force of a
revelation that the next stage of our partnership has to be about HER and that
my role now is to be of service to her and help her in every way possible to
express and manifest her own wonderful creative gifts and to fulfill herself.
I spent some time in the
presence of our children – Santha and I have six children between us, all young
adults now, and they are a tremendous blessing to us and the light and joy of
our lives. And I thought about how wonderful and full of love they all are, and
what good people they are, and I reflected on the struggles and challenges they
face, and the elegant, generous spirit in which they are all maturing and
developing and travelling their own journeys.
Next came thoughts about
the state of the world. I found myself dwelling on the terrible, inhuman way
the state of Israel behaves towards the Palestinians and of that hideous wall
that Israel has built, and about its constant aggressive seizure – in the name
of God no less!! – of more and more land on which Palestinian families and
communities have traditionally lived. The more power we have – and Israel has
immense power – the more it is our responsibility to love and I realized that
the great task facing Israel now, even though its people themselves feel
threatened and fearful and unloved, is to desist forthwith all acts motivated
by hatred and fear and to act instead with love and generosity towards all
neighbouring peoples, to dismantle that abominable wall, to stop aggressively
expanding settlements, and to carry the entire region forward into a new era
based on trust and the mutual benefit of all. It will be difficult, incredibly
difficult, and every attack on Israel by those communities that Israel has
monstrously abused for so long will be used as an excuse and a justification
for more acts of hate and cruelty by Israel itself, but the vicious cycle must
be broken and as the most powerful player on the regional stage it falls to
Israel to change the destructive, hateful, violent pattern that has been in
place for so long. At first acts of love will be rejected, thrown back in
Israel’s face, even punished, but love is giving, love is persistence, love it
kind and if Israel adopts a policy based on love, and shows as much kindness
and compassion towards non-Israelis – and concern for their needs and interests
-- as it presently shows toward its own people, then little by little the
injuries of the past will heal and a way will be found to bring peace and
security to all humans, regardless of their creed, colour, ethnic origin or
nationality, whose fate it is to live in that tortured region today.
It would be a good thing, I
couldn’t help thinking, if every military leader, every religious fanatic,
every president, every prime minister, every dictator presently exercising
power in the world were to be required to undergo ten sessions of Ayahuasca
before being allowed to make a single other decision.
By this point in my journey
my head seemed completely clear. I thought the visions had stopped. I gave
thanks that nothing too terrifying had happened to me and I got up and walked
around for a while. As I was walking, however, a new wave of visions descended
on me like a storm and I retreated once again to my mattress where the next
phase of my night’s journey began.
I was immediately in the
presence of the entity I saw when I last smoked DMT in 2011 and who I think of
as “the Trickster” or “the Magician” or “the Sorcerer” and whose aura, quite
unlike that of Mother Ayahuasca, is entirely male. I do not know who this
entity is or where he comes from. It is perfectly possible that he is simply
one of the many transformations of Mother Ayhuasca herself – and indeed the
healing female spirit that many of us experience through the brew is construed
as male by a number of traditional cultures in the Amazon rainforest.
So there was the Trickster,
and he was dancing, dancing, his face long and thin, severe and yet sensual,
with steep, angled planes as though drawn by Aubrey Beardsley. And he wore a
cloak of many colours made up of a patchwork of those same richly saturated
rhomboidal forms I had seen earlier in the session. He made elaborate,
skillful, elegant arm movements as though he held silver threads in each hand
and was stretching these threads out and showing them to me, and it came to me
that his dance was the dance of creation and that with each gesture and
movement he was bringing reality into being – fabricating, generating and
manifesting reality – and that in his dance some kind of immense cosmogenic
power was at work.
My feelings of fear were
very strong now, quite overwhelming and I wanted to flee, to run away from this
scene, to open my eyes wide and stop the visions, but again I exercised my
will, placed myself under control and stayed put and let this magnificent,
terrifying, cosmogenic dance unfold before me. I could not banish the fear
entirely but I began to realize that perhaps there is nothing to be afraid of
here and then just as this became clear to me I was overtaken by a giant wave
of nausea and had to shuffle round on my mattress and bring up my bucket to my
face (we all have buckets) in case I would vomit.
In the event I didn’t vomit
and after a few moments the nausea began to subside, and then Santha, who was
beside me, suggested that we go out into the middle of the floor and dance.
Sensing the change in mood our facilitator began to play rhythmic, vital,
energizing music and other couples and individuals joined us in the clear area
of wooden floor at the centre of the room and I felt no pain whatsoever in my
severely osteo-arthritic hip on which I am due to undergo surgery in April, and
we danced and danced and were overtaken by joy and the celebration of the
magnificent and generous and precious, precious gift of life.
Letter 4, Monday 4 February
2013
NB I make no claim as to
the reality-status of the entities and realms encountered in Ayahuasca visions
and described in the account that follows. It is possible that they are real
but only accessible to our senses in altered states of consciousness; but it is
equally possible that they are projections with no fundamental reality
whatsoever. There are many other possibilities, ranging from archetypes to the
imaginal, that are also worthy of consideration. All I can say for sure is that
they are experienced as real and I claim nothing more than that.
I’m still in Brazil, still
working with Ayahuasca. See earlier letters in this series (above) for my
accounts of sessions one and two.
Our third session took
place on the night of Wednesday 30 January 2013 into the small hours of
Thursday 31 January. I drank the same dose, 80 mililitres, that had taken me on
a complex and thought-provoking journey during the second session but this time
the effects were very different. Perhaps it was the music, which often sounded
to me like panes of glass being broken with a hammer, or sometimes like a
pneumatic drill breaking up a road, but I was for a long while completely
unable to drift into a visionary state. I felt distressed and unhappy, with a
slight admixture of relief that at least I would not have to confront the
entity I call the trickster that night.
This absence of visions,
which I experienced as a gulf, a void, seemed to go on for a very long while,
but gradually an odd state of mind began to overtake me. I had glimpses of a
whole other life that I was living somewhere else, where I was me and yet had a
different biography from the one that defines me in this life. I knew different
people, did different things and was living out that parallel life completely
oblivious to this one. So it was an odd thing, lying in the darkness in our
ceremonial space here in Brazil, under the influence of Ayahuasca but not very
much – if at all – carried away by visions, to experience these strange
episodes of cross-over, of intersection, in which I became aware of both lives
simultaneously with each life seeming like a dream – ephemeral, fleeting and
yet haunting – that I was experiencing in the other.
I stood, visited the
bathroom and came back to my mattress. I could not shake the feeling of being
haunted, then dizziness swept over me and suddenly, precipitously, as though
falling off a cliff I tumbled into the realm of vision.
It was as though I were
within a gigantic serpent. Its body, which had engulfed me, was transparent
allowing me to see through the patterns of its skin into the room beyond. At
the same time the feelings of unhappiness and distress that had set in very
early in the session remained with me and I found that I was unable to
surrender to the experience as I knew I should and unable to master my fear. I
was haunted by that dream world that was my other life, suspecting that in some
way something, some entity, some intelligence was seeking to possess me and not
liking or welcoming that feeling at all.
I continued to wrestle with
it. I would not surrender to it and at the same time it would not leave me
alone.
Eventually I went down to
the kitchen and dining area where in the winter months there is often a fire
for participants to gather round in the late stages of a session. Tonight, in
the Brazilian summer, there was no fire, but other members of our group were
already there and I fell into a conversation with them that helped to distract
me from my haunted state and draw me out, little by little, into a sense of
normality with myself.
Our fourth session took
place on the night of Saturday 2 February into the small hours of Sunday 3
February. I drank 90 mililitres of a different batch of the brew. The effects
were immediately powerful, but quite pleasant. Not at all threatening. I felt
strongly the presence of Mother Ayahuasca, Mother Goddess of our planet,
guardian of the great forests and of the wise and ancient trees, spirit of the
oceans in her manifestation as Yemanja, the blue angel, whose special day in
Brazil is 2 February.
Time passed. The brew
worked its way through me and I tottered out to the bathroom, sat myself on the
throne (sorry to be graphic but it is not for nothing that Ayahuasca is also
called “the Purge” in the Amazon) and lost track of time there. It was absurd
in a way. There I was sitting on the toilet doing this very mundane and earthy
thing and at the same time I could feel the presence of Mother Ayahuasca, of
this deeply compassionate, unutterably beautiful goddess who became present to
me in her serpent form and seemed to wrap me up in her coils and just loved me,
loved me, for the longest while. I was very strongly given the message that I
am too hard on myself, that I do not appreciate myself enough, that, yes, I
have made errors in my life, yes, I have caused pain to others – as we all
do – but that I am, nonetheless, fundamentally a good person and that perhaps
the time has come for me to stop beating myself up about my mistakes and even
to celebrate myself.
So I was surrounded by this
lovely warm energetic glow and I took it with me when I returned to the
ceremonial space. My intention was simply to lie quietly back on my mattress
and resume my discourse with Mother Ayahuasca, and if possible to experience
even more of that healing love that she had bestowed on me. Instead, however, I
gradually became aware of the malevolent attention of someone… or something.
After my encounter with the
Mother I still felt full of confidence, protected by a great and powerful
Goddess, able to handle whatever was thrown at me, but at this precise
moment I came under an intense and focused psychic attack and matters grew very
strange. I was still in the ceremonial room in Brazil but at the same time I
was not – as though everything had been shifted half a step to the side
into some parallel dimension that had always been there, overlapping with ours,
but had hitherto remained unseen. So at one and the same moment I was in my
body, on my mattress in the ceremonial space, and at the same time out of my
body in this other simulacrum of the room half a step to the side on another
plane of reality.
The entity that was
attacking me stood very close to me. It had human form, in fact it looked like
one of the other members of our group, but it was immediately obvious that it
was not a physical being.
Was it the trickster again?
Sparks of light flashed
from its eyes and there was sorcery in its hands and its gestures, and the
confidence I had felt just moments before that I would be able to handle this
malevolent force, that I might somehow meet it on equal terms and defend
against it, was blown away like mist. I realized I was completely powerless and
incompetent in its presence, utterly overmastered by it, out of my league. If
this were a spiritual dojo I would be the novice wearing the white belt and
this thing, whatever it was, would be the ninth dan black belt here to wipe the
floor with me.
I tried projecting love at
it. It wouldn’t work. The sense of threat and danger continued to mount. I
tried to invoke Mother Ayahuasca in her manifestation as the Blue Angel. This
did no good at all. I tried to raise a barrier of light. Failure again. Finally
my out-of-body self just curled up into a ball while I was pummeled and beaten
and humbled on that etheric plane.
I endured the continuing
psychic attack for some while, but then when I could bear it no longer I
decided the only course open to me was to leave the room, so I staggered out –
the Ayahuasca was very strong and I was a little unsteady on my feet – went
downstairs, across the dining area and out through the porch into the lush
tropical gardens that surround this property.
Immediately the atmosphere
changed again, the psychic attack ceased and I was in the domain of Mother
Ayahuasca. I walked amongst the trees and bushes, touching each one, and
entered into some kind of intense communion. Scintillating light and patterns,
alive with energy, filled with sentience, sparkling with magic, emanated
from every leaf, every branch and I was, for the longest time, completely
surrounded by and immersed in enchantment and beauty.
Later as I began to process
the experience and talked with others in the group it became clear that
everyone had experienced a powerful, unusual, truly extraordinary night.
And I thought, well working
with Ayahuasca is sometimes very strange, and it can be terrifying, and one
faces challenges not often met in everyday life, but what an incredible
blessing it is and what an incredible opportunity it is to learn and grow and
develop and fortify oneself against the dangers of this and other realms. And I
thought about the entity I had encountered, the trickster in one of his many
disguises, and my lost bout in that spiritual dojo and I suddenly realized
that I had not lost at all, I had gained an important lesson, and I no longer
felt afraid.
Letter 5, Tuesday 12
February 2013
Warning before you begin
reading. In what follows I am reporting experiences and also interactions with
others. I give my interpretations of those experiences and interactions, but I
make absolutely no claim that my interpretations are correct.
Very strange and disturbing
events around our fifth Ayahuasca session here in Brazil which took place on
the night of Monday 4 February into the small hours of Tuesday 5 February.
I mentioned in my previous
letter on this subject that during the fourth session something happened to me
that I experienced as an intense and focused psychic attack. To provide context
I cite extracts from that account here:
“I was still in the ceremonial room in Brazil but at the same time I was
not – as though everything had been shifted half a step to the side into some
parallel dimension that had always been there, overlapping with ours, but had
hitherto remained unseen. So at one and the same moment I was in my body, on my
mattress in the ceremonial space, and at the same time out of my body in this
other simulacrum of the room half a step to the side on another plane of
reality.
“The entity that was attacking me stood very close to me. It had human
form, in fact it looked like one of the other members of our group, but it was
immediately obvious that it was not a physical being… Sparks of light flashed
from its eyes and there was sorcery in its hands and its gestures, and the
confidence that I had felt just moments before that I would be able to handle
this malevolent force, that I might somehow meet it on equal terms and defend
against it, was blown away like mist. I realized I was completely powerless and
incompetent in its presence, utterly overmastered by it, out of my league. If
this were a spiritual dojo I would be the novice wearing the white belt and
this thing, whatever it was, would be the ninth dan black belt here to wipe the
floor with me.
“I tried projecting love at it. It wouldn’t work. The sense of threat
and danger continued to mount. I tried to invoke Mother Ayahuasca in her
manifestation as the Blue Angel. This did no good at all. I tried to raise a
barrier of light. Failure again. Finally my out-of-body self just curled up
into a ball while I was pummeled and beaten and humbled on that etheric plane.
“I endured the continuing psychic attack for some while, but then when I
could bear it no longer I decided the only course open to me was to leave the
room, so I staggered out – the Ayahuasca was very strong and I was a little
unsteady on my feet – went downstairs, across the dining area and out through
the porch into the lush tropical gardens that surround this property…”
So that was the fourth
session. Now just before the start of the fifth session something even stranger
and utterly unexpected happened. Having already stated our individual
intentions for the evening we began to queue up to receive our cups of the brew
from our facilitator.
Often during this moment
members of the group embrace and wish one another a good and safe journey; that
is quite normal. But this evening I heard a sudden cry of shock and one of the
women in our group – I must respect privacy and will not name her – protested
that another member of the group, a man (again, no names) had approached her
making a series of bizarre and threatening hand gestures and at the same time
projected his breath forcefully into her face. For those of us familiar with
Amazonian shamanic traditions it was immediately obvious that this was a very
serious act, for it is by blowing with the mouth that the brujos – sorcerers – of the
Amazon project the magic pathogenic darts known as virotes at their enemies in order to do them harm. Virotes may also be projected
through a sorcerer’s arms and out of openings in his hands.
“Did you do that to anyone
else?” asked the woman who had been the victim of this sinister assault.
The man admitted that he
had not.
“Then why did you do it to
me?” she asked.
“I was blessing you,” he
said.
“I don’t even let my
husband blow in my face like that,” she objected, “and I certainly didn’t ask
for your blessing! What were you trying to do to me?”
“Pah!” he replied, turning
his back, “you wouldn’t understand.”
It seemed that what had
been just a few days before a peaceful, trusting, cooperative group had
suddenly been exposed to some malign energy or intent. And for me the
strangest thing of all – the very strangest thing – was that the man who had
blown into the woman’s face, who had so aggressively stepped into her space and
infringed her sovereignty, was the very same man I had been attacked by the
night before in my visions.
Except then I had convinced
myself that it could not be him (“it had human form, in fact it looked like one
of the other members of our group, but it was immediately obvious that it was
not a physical being”).
Now, I was not so sure.
After such a disruption of
the flow it would probably have been wise if no one had drunk the brew that
night but, having come so far, we all did, including the woman who had been
assaulted – although she asked our facilitator to clear the negative energy
that she felt had been projected at her first.
I took my largest dose yet
in this series of sessions, 100 mililitres, composed myself for whatever lay
ahead and instantly regretted drinking so much. In the event, however, I was
hyper-alert, jangled and so afraid that whenever an intense visionary state
threatened to creep up on me I resisted it, actively and consciously fought
against it, and willed it away. The plain truth was that I did not wish to
become vulnerable again to that malevolent force that had overmastered me and
psychically bullied and terrified me during the previous session and since it
could not get at me in the physical realm, but only in the visionary or astral
realm, my instinct was not allow myself to go there.
And I found myself
wondering – what are we dealing with here? Is it in fact what it appears to be?
Is this individual who tonight so blatantly transgressed the sovereignty of
another member of the group in physical space, somehow manifesting a spirit
body and using it to transgress also on the astral plane? Or is it as I
originally suspected some powerful etheric entity that is not him at all but
simply disguising itself as him? Or could it be a bit of both? Could he be a
weak, perhaps psychopathic, individual who has made some sort of Faustian bargain
with a dark and hungry supernatural force and is serving as a more or less
willing lightning rod to channel it to others around him? Or might it be none of
the above?
Here, before going further,
I feel compelled to repeat that I make no claim as to the reality of the
entities and realms encountered in Ayahuasca visions. It is possible that they
are real but only accessible to our senses in altered states of consciousness;
but it is equally possible that they have no fundamental reality whatsoever.
There are many other possibilities, ranging from archetypes to projections to
the imaginal, that are also worthy of consideration. All I can say for sure is
that they are experienced as real and I claim nothing more than that.
About two hours into the
session we all heard a crashing sound somewhere below.
Along with our facilitator and a couple of others I hurried down the stairs and
we found another member of our group, a strong young man in his early thirties
collapsed on the floor. He said he did not understand what had happened to him.
Something dark had attacked him, swarmed over him, overpowered him, and he had
felt certain he was going to die unless he got out of the ceremonial space. On
the way down the stairs he had become faint and fallen. “I looked death in
the face,” he kept on saying, “I looked death in the face.”
Our facilitator went to work on
him. There are certain techniques – the use of a rattle, a thumb placed firmly
on the center of the brow, the chanting of the special songs called icaros– which are helpful in clearing
away negative psychic energies
and, after about half an hour, the young man was able to stand and walk around.
“I looked death in the face,” he repeated – but this time with a smile – “and I
survived.”
Later in conversation
our facilitator told us that when he had begun to work on the young man he
himself had been seized by a feeling of absolute terror – a powerful and
overwhelming dread that he was only able to master with great difficulty and by
drawing on everything he has learned in more than forty years of working with
the brew.
Later still, another member
of our group, a trained psychotherapist who is also enormously experienced with
the sacred use of psychedelics, came down from the ceremonial space to join us
in the kitchen, took a seat and said calmly and reflectively: “What the hell
was THAT?” He then reported that he too had been terrorized in the visionary
realm by some dark entity that he too associated with the individual who had
blown in the woman’s face at the beginning of the ceremony. “I tried very hard
to rationalize what was happening,” he said. “I tried to convince myself that
what I was experiencing was just my own shadow side taking illusory form, that
this was something I was projecting, but in the end I became certain it was a
real force, something utterly alien and deeply, deeply evil and completely
external to myself. I tried every technique I know to keep it at bay but
nothing worked.”
The following day I talked
to the individual who had blown in the woman’s face. “I’m a basement shaman,”
he said. He sounded quite proud of himself. “I make DMT and smoke it a lot at
home, exploring visionary worlds and I go around Ayahuasca groups doing this
work. Sometimes people don’t like it but I just withdraw within myself so they
can’t get to me.” He told me he hoped I appreciated how much courage it took
for him to talk to me openly like this about the disruption his behavior had
caused. I told him that my advice was that he should cultivate humility and not
imagine that he has any “work” to do with anyone else; only with himself. After speaking to me he spoke to the woman whose sovereignty he
had transgressed the night before and apologized to her, again repeating that
he hoped she appreciated what tremendous courage it took for him to come out in
the open like this. She found herself unable to accept his apology. “You’re
trying to make it all about you,” she told him, “with all this crap about your
courage. That’s not a genuine apology at all.”
Two days later, mercifully,
the man left. Indeed most of the group have now gone. Just seven of us remain
for the final two sessions, the first of which took place on the night of 10
February into the small hours of 11 February. It was a blissful, open-hearted
night with a great feeling of love, security, solidarity and trust. I am not
going to describe it further here except to say that the same member of our
group who had asked “What the hell was THAT?” after the fifth session had a new
insight during the night. He experienced a direct, personal encounter with the
loving entity whom we call Mother Ayahuasca (who is perhaps a goddess, though
she does not wish to be worshipped) and he asked her the same question: “What
the hell was THAT thing that attacked us during the fifth ceremony? Why did we
have to go through that?”
“You needed to see it,” she
replied. “Now you know what I have to deal with
all the time. It’s the evil that is loose in the world, twisting and destroying
the human spirit and I need your help to fight it, the help of good people
everywhere, the help of the power of love.”
I realize how strange all
this must sound to those (undoubtedly the vast majority who read this) who have
not drunk Ayahuasca and perhaps do not wish to. All I can say, as my good
friend Dennis McKenna puts it, is that Ayahuasca is the ultimate skeptic’s
challenge. It is not an intellectual argument. It is not a matter of empirical,
scientifically verifiable proofs. It is quite simply an experience. Once you’ve
had a deep and powerful encounter with the brew you can make of it what you
will, but until you have had such an encounter it is better to withhold
judgment.
I hope with these personal
accounts that I have added some quantum of useful data to the body of available information
about the Ayahuasca enigma. I have not held back and have shared with you both
the dark and the light sides of the realm of experience into which this
mysterious, ancient and sacred Amazonian brew can plunge us. It is as though a
doorway is opened into a parallel universe in which – as in the universe we
inhabit in our daily lives – there is both good and evil, but in which – both
there and here – we as conscious human creatures are gifted with the power of
choice. Sometimes we must face evil, sometimes it may do us harm, but we do not
have to join forces with it, we do not have to make compromises with it, we do
not have to bow down to it and we do not have to serve its purposes. Evil
cannot always be defeated but it can always – always! – be resisted.
So the Ayahuasca experience
is by no means all sweetness and light and if you go into a session with that
naïve expectation you may well, at some time or other, find yourself
unpleasantly surprised. Ayahuasca is extremely serious business and this is one
amongst many reasons why I would not advise anyone to partake of it without
skilled and well-intentioned shamanic guidance – though such guidance, these
days, is available from
a small but growing number of good-willed and completely un-egotistical Western
shamans as well as from Amazonian shamans. Indeed the fact that a self-styled
"shaman" hails from the Amazon is no guarantee whatsoever of the
quality of care and service he will provide; in this, as in all adventurous
journeys where hazards can be expected you should do your research carefully,
consult others and rely on word of mouth before committing yourself to a
particular path.
With these necessary
cautions expressed, however, I conclude by affirming that the Ayahuasca
experience is, above all else, about love and that there is openness of heart
in it and a tremendous sweeping away of the blockages and mechanisms of denial
that prevent us from getting to grips with and resolving fundamental issues in
our lives. Truly, it is not for nothing that a very strong Ayahuasca session
has been described as twenty years of psychotherapy in one night! In this
regard I have already set before readers here the radical change in my own life
initiated by a series of Ayahuasca experiences I had during October 2011 – see
my article Giving up the Green
Bitch: Reflections on Ayahuasca, Cannabis and the Mystery of Plant Teachers,
which is now permanently posted on the Articles page of my
website
And above and beyond all
that, as I’ve tried to show, the great virtue and promise of Ayahuasca is that
it raises profound questions about the nature of reality itself. There are, as
yet, no definite answers to those questions – perhaps there never will be – but
to confront the experiences that give rise to them, while sometimes terrifying
and often chastening, is, I believe, ultimately of the greatest value.
2 comments:
Thank you very much for sharing that experience and knowledge!
After doing Ayahuasca/DMT I had a psychotic breakdown, paranoia, derealisation, PTSD... 6 months and still recovering, several thousands of dollars on medical bills, unfit to work. Ruined my life actually.
Read the risks before doing it:
https://www.ayahuasca-risks.org
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