Video Exclusive
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/0603/features/peru.html
Deep in the Amazon jungle, writer Kira Salak tests ayahuasca, a
shamanistic medicinal ritual, and finds a terrifyingbut
enlighteningworld within.
Video is here:
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/images/03_06/altered_states_2Med_Prog.mov
For centuries, Amazonian shamans have used ayahuasca as a window into
the soul. The sacrament, they claim, can cure any illness. The author
joins in this ancient ritual and finds the worlds within more
terrifyingand enlighteningthan ever imagined.
I will never forget what it was like. The overwhelming misery. The
certainty of never-ending suffering. No one to help you, no way to
escape. Everywhere I looked: darkness so thick that the idea of light
seemed inconceivable.
Suddenly, I swirled down a tunnel of fire, wailing figures calling
out to me in agony, begging me to save them. Others tried to
terrorize me. "You will never leave here," they said. "Never. Never."
I found myself laughing at them. "I'm not scared of you," I said. But
the darkness became even thicker; the emotional charge of suffering
nearly unbearable. I felt as if I would burst from
heartbreakeverywhere, I felt the agony of humankind, its tragedies,
its hatreds, its sorrows. I reached the bottom of the tunnel and saw
three thrones in a black chamber. Three shadowy figures sat in the
chairs; in the middle was what I took to be the devil himself.
"The darkness will never end," he said. "It will never end. You can
never escape this place."
"I can," I replied.
All at once, I willed myself to rise. I sailed up through the tunnel
of fire, higher and higher until I broke through to a white light.
All darkness immediately vanished. My body felt light, at peace. I
floated among a beautiful spread of colors and patterns. Slowly my
ayahuasca vision faded. I returned to my body, to where I lay in the
hut, insects calling from the jungle.
"Welcome back," the shaman said.
The next morning, I discovered the impossible: The severe depression
that had ruled my life since childhood had miraculously vanished.
Giant blue butterflies flutter clumsily past our canoe. Parrots flee
higher into treetops. The deeper we go into the Amazon jungle, the
more I realize I can't turn back. It has been a year since my last
visit, and I'm here again in Peru traveling down the Río Aucayacu for
more shamanistic healing. The truth is, I'm petrified to do it a
second time around. But with shamanismand with the drinking of
ayahuasca in particularI've learned that, for me, the worse the
experience, the better the payoff. There is only one requirement for
this work: You must be brave. You'll be learning how to save yourself.
The jungle camp where our shamanistic treatment will take place is
some 200 miles (322 kilometers) from the nearest town, Iquitos, deep
in the Peruvian Amazon. Beside me are the other four members of my
tour. There is Winston, the biggest person I've ever met. Nearly
seven feet tall (two meters), surely over 400 pounds (181 kilograms),
he has a powerful body that could easily rip someone apart. I expect
him to be a bodyguard or a bouncer; turns out he's a security guard.
But there is something else about him. Something less tangible. It
seems to rest in the black circles beneath his eyes, the face that
never smiles, the glances that immediately dismiss all they survey.
Winston does not seem like a happy man.
Then the others: Lisa, who has a master's degree from Stanford and is
now pursuing her doctorate in political theory at Duke University;
Christy, who just quit her job counseling at-risk teens to travel
around South America; and Katherine, Christy's British friend. By all
appearances, our group seems to be composed of ordinary citizens. No
New Age energy healers. No pan flute makers. No hippies or
Rastafarians or nouveau Druids. Christy betrays only a passing
interest in becoming a yoga instructor.
And then there is me, who a year ago came to Peru on a lark to take
the "sacred spirit medicine," ayahuasca, and get worked over by
shamans. Little suspecting that I'd emerge from it feeling as if a
waterlogged wool coat had been removed from my shouldersliterally
feeling the burden of depression liftedand thinking that there must
be something to this crazy shamanism after all.
And so I am back again.
I've told no one this timeespecially not my family. I grew up among
fundamentalist atheists who taught me that we're all alone in the
universe, the fleeting dramas of our lives culminating in a final,
ignoble end: death. Nothing beyond that. It was not a prescription
for happiness, yet, for the first couple decades of my life, I became
prideful and arrogant about my atheism, believing that I was one of
the rare few who had the courage to face life without the "crutches"
of religion or, worse, such outrageous notions as shamanism. But for
all of my overweening rationality, my world remained a dark,
forbidding place beyond my control. And my mortality gaped at me
mercilessly. Lisa shakes me from my reveries, asking why I've come
back to take another tour with the shamans.
"I've got some more work to do," I say. Hers is a complicated
question to answer. And especially personal. Lord knows I didn't have
to come back. I could have been content with the results of my last
visit: no more morbid desires to die. Waking up one morning in a hut
in the sultry jungles of Peru, desiring only to live.
Still, even after those victories I knew there were some stubborn
enemies hiding out in my psyche: Fear and Shame. They were taking
potshots at my newfound joy, ambushing my successes. How do you
describe what it's like to want love from another but to be terrified
of it at the same time? To want good things to happen to you, while
some disjointed part of you believes that you don't deserve them? To
look in a mirror and see only imperfections? This was the meat and
potatoes of my several years of therapy. Expensive therapy. Who did
what, when, why. The constant excavations of memory. The sleuth-work.
Patching together theory after theory. Rational-emotive behavioral
therapy. Gestalt therapy. Humanistic therapy. Biofeedback. Positive
affirmations. I am a beautiful person. I deserve the best in life.
Then, there's the impatience. Thirty-three years old already, for
chrissakes. And in all that time, after all that therapy, only one
thing worked on my depressionan ayahuasca "cleansing" with Amazonian shamans.
Our canoe docks on the banks of the Río Aucayacu near a large hut
surrounded by jungle: the healing center. We unload our bags and
supplies and a local man leads us to our respective bungalows. I
share mine with Lisa.
Our accommodations are without frills: a mosquito net covering a
mattress on the floor, a sink, a toilet. Basic meals. Kerosene lamps.
We can either bathe in the river or use a communal shower. It is a
kind of asceticism, a shedding of life's little sophistications in
preparation for the hard work ahead. Where we're going, all worldly
goods are worthless. Where we're going, the only way out is through fear.
The head shaman for our group is Hamilton Souther, an American and
the man behind the company that runs these journeys, Blue Morpho. He
is 27, blond-haired, blue-eyed, exceptionally good-looking. But talk
to him for even a minute, and his striking appearance quickly fades
before his most obvious quality: his unconditional acceptance of
everyone. You cannot make him angry. You cannot seduce him. You
cannot offend him (though it is extremely tempting to try). He is
like a mirror, always reflecting back your own ego, showing you your
attachments, your fixations, your fears. If you end up liking him,
that's great, but if you don't, it's unimportant.
How Hamilton, a young California gringo, ended up in the middle of
the Peruvian jungle as a shamanic healer is a story that stretches
credulity. When he was "younger" (which is to say, a young adult), he
explains, he led a very troubled life. Controlled by anger, he found
the world to be a depressing, hopeless place in which he was just
another inmate doing time. Then on the darkest night of his life,
when he was filled with spiritual despair, he says he called to God
and begged himif he did really existto show himself. Hamilton
claims he then heard voices and saw spirits. He thought he'd gone
insane. So did his psychologist. But then a trusted acquaintance
suggested that he wasn't crazy at all; he'd merely opened channels to
other dimensions.
One of the many spirit voices advised him to go to South America to
apprentice under a shaman. He took this advice, made his way to Peru,
and found two master shamans to teach him everything they knew. One
of them, Don Julio Gerena Pinedo, is with us now. He is 87, has been
leading ayahuasca ceremonies for over 50 years, and is widely
regarded as one of the most powerful healers in the Amazon. He sits
hunched over in a chair in the main hut, holding a large cigar, or
mapacho, made from jungle-grown tobacco that is used, he says, to
purify his body from negative energy. Hamilton and his three gringo
shaman apprentices affectionately call Don Julio "Yoda."
On the way here, Hamilton stopped our canoe periodically to hike into
the jungle to collect the fixings for our ayahuasca brew.
"Ayahuasca," a Quechua word meaning "vine of the soul," is shorthand
for a concoction of Amazonian plants that shamans have boiled down
for centuries to use for healing purposes. Though some call the
mixture a drug, indigenous peoples regard such a description as
derogatory. To them it is a medicine that has been used by the tribes
of the Amazon Basin for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years,
demanding respect and right intention. The main chemical in the brew,
dimethyltryptamine (DMT), accounts for ayahuasca's illegality in the
United States; DMT, though chemically distant from LSD, has
hallucinogenic properties. But it is ayahuasca's many plant
ingredients cooperating ingeniously to allow DMT to circulate freely
in the body that produce the unique ayahuasca experience.
To prepare the brew, apprentices spend years under the tutelage of an
elder shaman getting to know the different plant ingredients, passing
weeks or months at a time learning their individual healing
properties and governing spirits. These beings, they claim, teach
them icaros, or spirit songs, which, when sung or whistled, call
forth the plants' unique assistance during ceremonies. The training
isn't easy; those like Hamilton who earn the title of "master
shaman"highly respected members of Amazonian communitiesreceive
patients from far and wide. Based on the individual needs of their
patients, shamans must know which plants are required for a ceremony
(there are two primary ingredients, but any of an estimated 100
species have been used in ayahuasca brews), how much of them to
harvest, and how to prepare them for ingestion. The plants' spirits
are then said to work together to produce the most successful
possible healing for each person, regardless of what ails them.
The taking of ayahuasca has been associated with a long list of
documented cures: the disappearance of everything from metastasized
colorectal cancer to cocaine addiction, even after just a ceremony or
two. It's thought to be nonaddictive and safe to ingest. Yet Western
scientists have all but ignored it for decades, reluctant to risk
their careers by researching a substance containing the outlawed DMT.
Only in the past decade, and then only by a handful of researchers,
has ayahuasca begun to be studied.
At the vanguard of this research is Charles Grob, M.D., a professor
of psychiatry and pediatrics at UCLA's School of Medicine. In 1993
Dr. Grob launched the Hoasca Project, the first in-depth study of the
physical and psychological effects of ayahuasca on humans. His team
went to Brazil, where the plant mixture can be taken legally, to
study members of a native church, the União do Vegetal (UDV), who use
ayahuasca as a sacrament, and compared them to a control group that
had never ingested the substance. The studies found that all the
ayahuasca-using UDV members had experienced remission without
recurrence of their addictions, depression, or anxiety disorders. In
addition, blood samples revealed a startling discovery: Ayahuasca
seems to give users a greater sensitivity to serotoninone of the
mood-regulating chemicals produced by the bodyby increasing the
number of serotonin receptors on nerve cells.
Unlike most common antidepressants, which Grob says can create such
high levels of serotonin that cells may actually compensate by losing
many of their serotonin receptors, the Hoasca Project showed that
ayahuasca strongly enhances the body's ability to absorb the
serotonin that's naturally there.
"Ayahuasca is perhaps a far more sophisticated and effective way to
treat depression than SSRIs [antidepressant drugs]," Grob concludes,
adding that the use of SSRIs is "a rather crude way" of doing it. And
ayahuasca, he insists, has great potential as a long-term solution.
While it's tantalizing to wonder whether such positive physiological
changes took place in me when I was last in Peru, I'm also intrigued
by the visions I had, which seemed to have an equally powerful role
in alleviating my depression: It was as if I'd been shown my own
self-imposed hells and taught how to free myself from them. What was
really going on?
According to Grob, ayahuasca provokes a profound state of altered
consciousness that can lead to temporary "ego disintegration," as he
calls it, allowing people to move beyond their defense mechanisms
into the depths of their unconscious mindsa unique opportunity, he
says, that cannot be duplicated by any nondrug therapy methods.
"You come back with images, messages, even communications," he
explains. "You're learning about yourself, reconceptualizing prior
experiences. Having had a profound psycho-spiritual epiphany, you're
not the same person you were before."
But the curious should take heed: The unconscious mind holds many
things you don't want to look at. All those self-destructive beliefs,
suppressed traumatic events, denied emotions. Little wonder that an
ayahuasca vision can reveal itself as a kind of hell in which a
person is forcedliterallyto face his or her demons.
"Ayahuasca is not for everyone," Grob warns. "It's probably not for
most people in our world today. You have to be willing to have a very
powerful, long, internal experience, which can get very scary. You
have to be willing to withstand that."
It's 9 p.m.time for the first ceremony. We all meet in the main hut.
Outside, night has taken over the jungle, which resounds with
piercing insect calls. We will have five such ceremonies before going
back to civilization. Each takes place at 9 p.m. We've fasted since
lunch. One of the apprentices spreads out foam mattresses in a circle
for us to lie on. Hamilton and Don Julio sit in front of us, in
chairs, lighting their mapachos, with their apprentices seated on
either side. Hamilton asks Lisa, the would-be Duke political
theorist, to sit next to Winston, but she immediately protests.
"I don't want to sit next to any aggressive male energy," she says.
"Can I change places?"
Winston glances at her forlornly. Lisa is probably the most
physically attractive of the women on our tourthin, dainty, with
delicate porcelain-doll features. Winston rolls his eyes as Lisa
moves away from him, and Hamilton puts me next to him instead.
Before we start, Hamilton takes out a liter of the ayahuasca he'd
prepared during the day. This he hands to Don Julio, who blesses it
with his mapacho, blowing tobacco smoke inside the bottle and over
his body. He clears his throat several times, sounding like a horse
whinnying, and hands the bottle to Hamilton to do the same. Hamilton
pays homage to the ayahuasca spirits, speaking to them in Spanish and
entreating them to help us.
Everyone receives a plastic basinknown ominously as a "vomit
bucket"and a roll of toilet paper for wiping our mouths after
puking; this can be expected during most ceremonies, unless, as the
shamans say, people are used to suppressing their feelings. Many
mistakenly think that holding back emotions is a sign of strength and
control; actually, Hamilton says, it's the opposite. Avoidance, a
refusal to face painful feelings, is a weakness; unless this
suppression stops, a person will never be healed of physical and
psychological issues.
Perhaps the worst thing about taking ayahuasca is the taste. It is a
thick brown sludge, gritty and triggering an immediate gag reflex.
The closest taste comparison I can make is Baileys Irish Cream mixed
with prune juice. The shamans say that the spirits tell them how much
each of us needs to drink. The more healing a person needs, the more
they get. I must need a lot of healing, then, as nearly a full cup is
passed to me, versus the baby helpings poured for Lisa and Christy.
The good news, I tell myself, is that no one to my knowledge has ever
died from ayahuasca.
I drink it as if I were a contestant on Fear Factor, in two big,
quick gulps. When everyone in our circle has drunk, including
Hamilton, the kerosene lamp is put out and darkness fills the hut.
Hamilton and Don Julio start shaking their chakapas, or leaf rattles,
and singing their spirit songs. Nothing happens for about 20 minutes.
I close my eyes and wait. Soon I start to see a pale green glow;
colorful, primordial forms, resembling amoebas or bacteria, float by.
Alarmed, I open my eyes. And this is uncanny: I can see the rafters
of the hut, the thatch roof, the glow of the stars outside the
screened windowsbut the same amoeba-like things are passing over
that view, as if superimposed.
"You're seeing with your third eye," one of the apprentices explains.
Also known in Eastern spiritual traditions as the sixth chakra, the
third eye supposedly allows for connection with other dimensions. And
what if I am actually seeing two worlds at once? It seems too
incredible, and I close my eyes to limit the confusion. Fantastical
scenes glide by, composed of ever-shifting geometric forms and
textures. Colors seem to be the nature of these views; a dazzling and
dizzying display of every conceivable hue blending and parting in
kaleidoscopic brilliance. But then the colors vanish all at once as
if a curtain has been pulled down. Blackness. Everywhere.
Dark creatures sail by. Tangles of long, hissing serpents. Dragons
spitting fire. Screaming humanlike forms. For a bunch of
hallucinations, they seem terrifyingly real. An average ayahuasca
ceremony lasts about four to five hours. But in ayahuasca spacewhere
time, linear thought, and the rules of three-dimensional reality no
longer applyfour to five hours of sheer darkness and terror can feel
like a lifetime. My heartbeat soars; it's hard to breathe. But I have
done this before. I remind myself that what I'm experiencing now is
my fear taking symbolic form through the ayahuasca. Fear that I have
lived with my entire life and that needs to be released.
Hamilton explains it this way: Everyone has an energetic body run by
an inextinguishable life force. In Eastern traditions, this force,
known as chi or prana, is manipulated through such things as
acupuncture or yoga to run smoothly and prevent the buildup of the
negative energies that cause bodily disease, mental illness, and even
death. To Amazonian shamans, however, these negative energies are
actual spirit entities that attach themselves to the body and cause
mischief. In everyone, Hamilton asserts, there is a loving "higher
self," but whenever unpleasant thoughts enter a person's mindanger,
fear, sorrowit's because a dark spirit is hooked to the body and is
temporarily commandeering the person's mind. In some cases, he adds,
particularly evil spirits from the lowest hell of the "astral realms"
take over a person
permanentlyknown as full-blown demonic possessioncreating a
psychopathic mind that seeks only to harm others.
I work on controlling my breathing. But such thick darkness. Clouds
of bats and demonlike faces. Black lightning. Black walls
materializing before me no matter which way I turn. Closer and
closer, the darkness surrounding me, trapping me. I can barely breathe.
"Hamilton!" I belt out. "Help me!"
"On my way, Kira," he says calmly. "Hang in there. Don't give in to the fear."
That's the trick: Don't give in to it. But it's much easier said than
done. I must tell it that I'm stronger. I must tell it that it has no
effect upon me. But it does. I'm terrified. The darkness presses
against me; it wants to annihilate me.
Hamilton is standing over me now, rattling his chakapa, singing his
spirit songs. Inexplicably, as he does this, the darkness backs off.
But more of it comes in a seemingly endless stream. I see dark,
raging faces. My body begins to contort; it feels as if little balls
are ripping through my flesh, bursting from my skin. The pain is
excruciating. I writhe on the mattress, screaming. Hamilton calls
over one of his helpersa local woman named Rosawith directions to
hold me down.
"Tell the spirits to leave you with ease," Hamilton says to me.
"They won't!" I yell out. And now they appear to be escaping en masse
from my throat. I hear myself making otherworldly squealing and
hissing sounds. Such high-pitched screeches that surely no human
could ever make. All the while there is me, like a kind of witness,
watching and listening in horror, feeling utterly helpless to stop
it. I've read nothing about this sort of experience happening when
taking ayahuasca. And now I see an image of a mountain in Libya, a
supposedly haunted mountain that I climbed a year and a half ago,
despite strong warnings from locals. A voice tells me that whatever
is now leaving my body attached itself to me in that place.
Haunted mountains. Demonic hitchhikers. Who would believe this? Yet
on and on it goes. The screaming, the wailing. My body shakes wildly;
I see a great serpent emerging from my body, with designs on
Hamilton. He shakes his chakapa at it, singing loudly, and after what
seems like an infinite battle of wills, the creature leaves me. I
grab the vomit bucket and puke for several minutes. Though my stomach
has been empty for over eight hours, a flood of solid particles comes
out of me.
The visions fade. My body stops shaking. Hamilton takes his seat
again and Rosa releases her grip on me. I examine the vomit bucket
with a flashlight: Black specks the size of dimes litter
orange-colored foam. The shamans believe that what we vomit out
during a ceremony is the physical manifestation of dark energy and
toxins being purged from the body. The more that comes out, the better.
"Good work, Kira," Hamilton says to me from across the room.
My entire body hurts. My head throbs. I can hear the others in the
room, whispering to each other. I had barely been conscious of their
experiences, they had seemed so quiet by comparison.
"Is Kira OK?" Christy asks Hamilton.
"She just had a little exorcism," Hamilton explains with relish. "She's fine."
"Bloody hell; was that what it was?" says Katherine.
"She just picked up some travelers," Hamilton says. "We had to get
rid of them."
"Bloody hell!" Katherine says again. "Is this what you'd consider a
normal ceremony, Hamilton?"
"About one out of a hundred ceremonies is as intense as this one. We
kicked some real demon butt tonight."
The apprentices agree that they've never experienced anything as
intense as tonight's ceremony. I hope it's not true, though. It's
hardly a distinction worth celebrating.
"Once you get the upper hand over demons energetically," Hamilton
says to me, "they leave you without any trouble. That'll come. One
thing at a time."
There is probably no hangover that comes anywhere close to the
hangover from an exorcism. It's the next morning and I can barely
walknot that I really want to. I have zero energy. My voice is
almost gone, and I must communicate in a hoarse whisper if I
communicate at all. This has proven not to be an issue as the others
on the tour are so freaked out by what happened last night that they
can barely mumble an obligatory "good morning" to me. Lisa has now
made it clear that she doesn't want to sit next to Winston or me. I
give her a wide berth as I take my seat at the breakfast table. I've
never felt so vulnerable before complete strangers, and I feel
embarrassed and dejected by their stares. I want to tell them that
what happened last night was completely out of my control. That,
somehow, it wasn't me.
But how to explain it when I don't quite understand it myself? All I
can say for sure is that Hamilton's role as shaman was critical in
helping me. He says he drinks the brew along with us, his "clients,"
so he and his army of spirit helpers can defeat our most formidable
demons and guide us out of our darkness.
Shamans will tell you that during an ayahuasca cleansing they're not
working with the contents of a person's hallucination but are
actually visiting that person in whatever plane of reality his or her
spirit happens to be. We are not, they insist, confined to the
reality of our five senses, but can transcend it and enter a
multidimensional universe.
Their perspective is not unlike that presented by quantum theorists,
such as David Bohm, who describe a holographic universe with
coexisting realms of reality. To Amazonian shamans, there are an
infinite number of such realms, each as distinct from one another as
London or Paris, each inhabited by beings with certain appearances,
abilities, and customs. To become a master shaman, they contend, one
must learn to negotiate these worlds, to enlist the assistance of
their various denizens, to become comfortable working in places of
light and darkness. For, they will tell you, there is no doubt that
there is a heaven and hellmany levels and manifestations of each, in
factwhich are as real as Tokyo or Palm Beach. Yes, one finds angels
and demons in such places. Hollywood got that part right.
But to the mind trained in the West, such notions of spirit travel
and multidimensional reality are a long stretch for the imagination.
"I do not believe that there are beings and creatures just like us
who reside elsewhere in other realms," wrote Benny Shanon, Ph.D., a
psychology professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He drank
ayahuasca in more than 130 ceremonies, studying his and others'
vision experiences and producing one of the most extensive books on
the subject to date, The Antipodes of the Mind, in which he concludes
that the visions are simply hallucinations of the highest order:
"Under [ayahuasca's] intoxication, people's imagination and creative
powers are greatly enhanced. Thus, their minds are prone to create
the fantastic images they see with the brew."
In Shanon's view, as well as in those of other Western scientists,
DMT-created visions are simply extraordinary reflections of the
contents of the unconscious mind. Grob, the UCLA psychiatrist and
ayahuasca researcher, agrees with this in part, though he adds:
"Sometimes the visions are uncanny and don't seem to reflect personal
experience. . . . People consistently have very profound spiritual
experiences with this compound."
And this notion of a spiritual experience marks the very juncture
where Western science and analytic thought depart on the subject of
ayahuasca and where indigenous culture and mysticism come in. Most
ayahuasca researchers agree that, curiously, the compound appears to
affect people on three different levelsthe physical, psychological,
and spiritualcomplicating efforts to definitively catalog its
effects, let alone explain specific therapeutic benefits. Says Ralph
Metzner, psychologist, ayahuasca researcher, and editor of the book
Sacred Vine of Spirits, "[Healing with ayahuasca] presumes a
completely different understanding of illness and medicine than what
we are accustomed to in the West. But even from the point of view of
Western medicine and psychotherapy it is clear that remarkable
physical healings and resolutions of psychological difficulties can
occur with this medicine."
We take a break for a day to recuperate. By the time the next
ceremony comes along, I am enthusiastic and ready to go. We all take
our seats in the main hut, Lisa sitting farthest from me. With
resignation, I notice that I've been doled out a huge dose of
ayahuasca, again. We all drink. Soon, the telltale green hue covers
everything, and the visions begin. Dark visions. The bats, the
snakes, the demon figures. Still, my body does not quake in pain and
horror as before. I have learned how fear works: It only affects me,
terrorizes me, if I believe the thoughts it puts in my head.
All negative thoughts, shamans believe, are dark spirits speaking to
us, trying to scare us into reacting; the spirits then feed on our
reactivity, growing stronger and more formidable until they finally
rule over us. This is how, Hamilton suggests, addictions and
psychological disorders develop in people.
"Everyone hears the voices of spirits," he tells me. "They've just
convinced themselves that they are hearing their own thoughts." We
must, he maintains, practice choosing which thoughts we pay attention to.
Now I'm traveling to a realm where I meet my various incarnations
from past lives. We are connected to a large wheel; whenever fear
energy leaves the top of my head in puffs of dark smoke, it leaves
their heads at the same time. Our lives, it seems, are interconnected
and dependent. Outside of linear time, all our lifetimes, all our
many incarnations, occur simultaneously. "Past life" is really a
misnomer; "other life" seems a more accurate way of describing it.
With some of the individuals, I can guess their historical period
from their clothing. With others, I can't place them at all. There is
a balding, overweight, monk-looking guy. The big muscular warrior
with the pointed helmet (who, he says, gives me my present interest
in the martial arts). The black woman who is a slave in North
Carolina. Interestingly, there are only about 15 or so individuals; a
spirit tells me that many people average less than 30 total Earth
incarnations and that their souls commonly skip centuries,
reincarnating only in spirit realms. And what of the two women who
aren't wearing historically identifiable clothing? "We are your
future incarnations," one of them explains, lovingly.
After three ceremonies, I still feel that I have something big to
purge. There is something stubborn in me, refusing to be released. I
walk through the jungle and wade into a narrow river, dunking myself
in the water. Schools of piranha-size fish, mojaritas, nip harmlessly
at my skin, unnerving me. Earlier today I was still scared to look at
myself in the mirror, still scared of the self-judgment, the
all-too-familiar shame.
I report to the hut for the next ceremony. The others sit or lie in
hammocks, waiting silently, fretfully. Their experiences, while
nowhere near as intense as mine, have been bad enough in their view.
Winston has found the darkness during his visions tedious and
unrelenting. Christy actually found herself crying during the last
ceremony, which is something she says she doesn't do. Lisa has found
her ceremony experiences "too dark" for her tastes and blames me for
creating this.
"It's her own fear she's scared of," Hamilton told me earlier. "It
has nothing to do with you."
We begin the ceremony, drink the ayahuasca. I'm hoping to find myself
in some heavenly realms this time, but again, as usual, the darkness.
With disappointment, I find myself entering a familiar tunnel of
fire, heading down to one of the hell realms. I don't know where I'm
going, or why, when I suddenly glimpse the bottom of the tunnel and
leap back in shock: Me, I'm there, but as a little girl. She's
huddled, captive, in a ball of fire before the three thrones of the
devil and his sidekicks. As soon as I reach her, she begins wailing,
"Don't leave me! Don't leave me!" It's heartbreaking to her.
I think this must be a part of me that I lost. Long ago. The shamans
believe that whenever a traumatic event happens to us, we lose part
of our spirit, that it flees the body to survive the experience. And
that unless a person undergoes a shamanistic "soul retrieval," these
parts will be forever lost. Each one, they say, contains an element
of who they truly are; people may lose their sense of humor, their
trust of others, their innocence. According to psychotherapist and
shamanic healer Sandra Ingerman, author of Soul Retrieval, such
problems as addictions, personality disorders, and memory blackouts
are all warning signs that a person may have lost key portions of themselves.
"No one will help me!" the little girl wails in my vision. And now
she is meI am wailing. Crying like I have never cried before. I know
it as an expression of primordial terror from a time when, as a small
child, I felt abandoned, set helpless before the universe. I have
never felt such profound fear. How did this happen to me? the adult
me wonders with fury. And why?
"The darkness was so heavy during your childhood," a spirit voice
says to me, "that your soul splintered beneath the weight."
I have an awareness of having lost so much of myself. Who will I be
when all the parts come home? I feel a hand on my back: Hamilton's.
"I'm here to help you," he says. Suddenly, the flames trapping the
little girl disappear. Everything is covered in a freezing white
frost. I shiver from the intense cold.
"Julio and I have frozen the devil," Hamilton declares. "You can pull
the little girl out now."
So that's why everything got so cold, I think. But wait a minutewhat
are Hamilton and Don Julio doing in my vision? How can Hamilton see
what I'm seeing?
"Pull her out," Hamilton says to me.
I reach down and take the girl's hand. When she feels my touch, she
stops crying, and I pull her up, out of the tunnel of fire. The
darkness departs. We reach realms of bright white lightthe first
such places my visions have allowed. The heavenly realms.
"Your little girl has to enter your body," Hamilton says. "Call to her."
I do. I see her split into several little girls, each looking like me
at a different age. One at a time, they appear to enter me, my body
jolting backwards for each "soul part," as Hamilton calls them, that
was retrieved.
As soon as they're done, I see a vision of them. Dazed by the
brilliant light of their new world, the girls walk through green
grass, under pure white clouds. Scores of butterflies land on them,
smothering them. It is an unbelievably perfect place in which there
is a sense that nothing could ever hurt me.
Only one ceremony left and I haven't yet experienced God. The shamans
say they see him all the time; Hamilton suggests I visit him.
Strange: Though I can't say conclusively whether he exists, I'm angry
with him. If God is out there, I have a few bones to pick with him.
The ceremony begins with the usual tedious blackness. I keep sending
it away, but it reappears in its myriad forms: bats, demons, dragons.
"God!" I yell out in my vision. "Where are you?"
But only darkness. The seemingly endless darkness. I'm getting more
and more aggravated. Why do religious people always say that God is
there for you when you need him? Well, he's nowhere. Just serpents
and those little demon guys.
All of a sudden, I realize that my fears about his not existing,
about my not being able to find him, may be thoughts created by dark
spirits. I release those fears and immediately I rise higher, into
white realms. Through a hazy gray cloud, I can see a vision of a
white-bearded manGod? Appearing like a giant Santa Claus. And while
I'm sure the way he looks is a stereotyped invention of my mind, a
kind of visual distillation of something wholly beyond conception,
it's bizarre to be talking to him about my problems.
"Why did you hate me so much?" I demand.
"I never hated you," he says. "You hated yourself. I have always
loved you as my own child. Know that suffering is the greatest
teacher on Earth. It leads us out of our belief in separation."
I don't know what he means by "separation."
Darkness falls. I can't see God in my vision anymore. A scathing pain
rises in my chestthe most excruciating pain I've ever felt. I squeak
out a cry to Hamilton and he comes over, singing spirit songs.
Legions of demons sail out of my body. I'm helpless before them; they
contort me.
I'm made to see that what is being purged now is a deeply rooted
belief that I don't deserve to be alive, that no one can love me and
I will always need to justify my existence. Slowly I gain the upper
hand over the darkness and order it to leave my body. I feel a
pressure in my chest that could break all my ribs. I grab my bucket,
vomit out what appears to be a stream of fire. Hamilton kneels down
and blows tobacco smoke onto the top of my head. I cough violently
and watch as demons burst out of me, roaring, only to disintegrate in
white light.
And before me this enormous image of God. He takes me in his arms and
coddles me like a child. I know, unequivocally, that I am loved and
have always been loved. That I matter and have always mattered. That
I'm safe and, no matter what happens, will always be safe. I will
never allow myself to become separated from him again.
As the visions fade and the ceremony closes, I find myself back in
the dark hut. But in my mind's eye I'm still sitting in God's
enormous lap. Don Julio nods and silently smokes his mapacho. The
others whisper about their experiences. Winston still didn't find a
way out of his darkness and will extend his time in Peru to do more
ceremonies. Katherine sighs luxuriously: She's been bathing in the
heavenly astral realms, having broken through her own issues. Lisa's
darkness hasn't let up and it's still my fault; she, too, will be
staying in Peru for more shamanistic work.
Me, I'm ready to go home. I sit up with difficulty, as if waking from
decades of sleep. It would be easier for me to call it all a dream, a
grand hallucination. Then I could have my old world back, in which I
thought I knew what was real and unreal, true and untrue. Now the
problem is, I don't know anything.
It takes almost all the energy I have left, but I feel around for my
flashlight and shine it into my vomit bucket. No. I lean down closer.
Steady the beam of light. I catch my breath as I examine the object:
A small black snake seems to have materialized from my body.
.
0 comments:
Post a Comment