Juan Flores Salazar (above)
“Into the night of the heart
your name drops slowly
and moves in silence and falls
and breaks and spreads its water.”- Pablo Neruda
Ayahuasca. Vine of the soul. Rope of death. It’s an intoxicating beverage that flummoxes the mind and ignites the incendiary soul. It’s psychotherapeutic not psychotomimetic. It is here to help us evolve into beings beyond our wildest dreams. It is here to help the imagination. It massages it, stretches it, and elevates it to new levels of comprehension.
The veritable summit of the medicinal trip:
It’s like a flying saucer landing on the prefrontal lobes. It’s like the blossoming an alien rose. It’s like a million conundrums jumping out of the multihued chrysalis of hyperspace. Then you get the sneaking suspicion you’re bobbing for your ego in a tub filled to the brim with a sphinx-like substance, the ambrosia of the bizarre.
“Beyond blood and bones,
beyond bread, beyond wine,
beyond fire, you come flying.”- Pablo Neruda
During the course of this past week, I had the incomparable pleasure of drinking ayahuasca twice with the Ashanincan shaman, Maestro Juan Flores. The ayahuasca sessions took place at the Windy Hills resort near Victoria Beach. In tandem with the healing sessions, Juan gave insightful and laconic lessons on the nature of ayahuasca. I also went for a swim, partook in some yoga sessions, went to a sweat lodge, and relaxed with some incredible people. The week was perfect—a sojourn in the terrestrial paradise.
Before the gathering at Windy Hills, I went to a talk given by Jeremy Narby at the Park Theatre. This transpired on Sunday. Narby talked about his run-in with three fluorescent serpents while under the influence of ayahuasca, the need to preserve indigenous plant-life in one of the most bio-diverse regions on the planet, his battle with his own presuppositions regarding native spiritual practice and folklore, and the pressing and exigent need for science to open the proverbial floodgates of knowledge so more insights can inundate its own biased perspective. Narby said this can be achieved by a type of “bi-cognitivism,” a epistemological perspective that values indigenous knowledge and scientific acumen. I especially loved it when Narby talked about physarum polycephalum, an amorphous slime mold that can solve a maze without a brain. When protein is placed at the entrance and the exit of the labyrinth, the slime mold solves the labyrinth by turning its flimsy body into a long tube that creates the shortest possible distance between two points. Narby deftly explained that this is an example of “intelligence in nature”. Even without a thinking edifice, a brain, the amoeba is still able to solve the mystery of the maze.
Before the educational lecture, Jim Sanders and Andre Clement showed the rapt audience a preview of their as-yet-to-be-released film, “Nosis: A Cinematic Vision Quest”. This film looks like it is going to be quite the journey, and I am highly looking forward to seeing the finished product.
I will now turn to some of my notes regarding the events that transpired on Monday and Tuesday.
“We are all apart of one great animal
a body asleep to its parts
the bone of night
strong and sharp sweet and singing”- Will Penna
Monday Into Tuesday
We deviated from the itinerary and did not do the ayahuasca ceremony on this date. We did a tobacco purge instead. According to the tabaqueros, the tobacco purge prepares the body for the virulence of ayahuasca, extricates negative energies from the mind, and attracts the spirits of nature.
We did this tobacco purge about 10 o clock at night under the watchful, compassionate eye of the Maestro, Sandra, and obviously the tobacco mother. The taste wasn’t acrid or excessively brackish, but it definitely wasn’t completely pleasant either. During the brief ceremony, a ceremony where icaros were intoned with exquisite precision and beauty, I could feel the shamanic plant move into my viscera and veins much like wind moves through the pines. Gentle and soothing. I then puked. However, I didn’t fully feel the effects of the intoxication until I feel asleep. After falling asleep for what felt like twenty minutes or so, I awoke to the consummate feeling of disorientation. My body temperature was rising, and it felt like I was being acclimatized by the fever pitch. I slipped in and out of vivid dream states where I was flying around my grandparents’ old cabin near Winnipeg beach. At one point I was disconcertingly at the st. vital mall helping a family return a broken computer to a shop unbeknownst to my feverish mind. When I woke up from this dream narrative, my body felt like it was being restructured and reconfigured by the tobacco spirit. My body also felt like it was going to reach the temperature of a supernova.
I am now awake and slightly reeling from last night’s encounter with a force I don’t fully understand. Today I and all the great souls here prepare for the first ayahuasca ceremony. The antipodes of the mind shall be walked across.
Tuesday
Today started off with a yoga session. My bones certainly aren’t used to stretching like that. It felt great though. Improving dexterity and prana flow through yogic asanas is a good way to keep healthy.
Later in the afternoon, Juan gave a talk on the ayahuasca vine of the curandero. He said the healing man (shiripiari) must use big sections of the vine in the making of the brew. He said the section must stretch from the roots to the clouds. He stressed the importance of spiritual work with plants, and asking crucial questions to the plants when the burracheira (strange intoxication) begins.
Juan and Sandra then gave each man and woman at the gathering a bottle of camalonga. Camalonga cleans the intestines, cleans the blood and the brain, helps people with insomnia, can be used to combat pesky migraines, protects the body from maladies that assail and destroy, and it also imparts good dreams to the dreamer. It acts like an oneirogen and a body cleanser, in other words.
Juan also talked about sumiruna, an imperious spirit of the water. Allegedly he is able to travel the entire world in five minutes. Sumiruna can also teach the ayahuasquero about aquatic plants. In order to build a proper rapport with sumiruna, the ayahuasquero must follow a very strict diet.
The ceremony at night was a transformative one. The combination of the icaros (songs) and the virulent mareacion (intoxication) creates a doorway into a parallel world filled with spiritual agencies and powers. At one point I could feel an insectoid intelligence shooting a prismatic beam of light into my heart chakra. This seemed to dissolve any scars that seemed to collect there. At another point I rested my head on a pillow and my right ear turned into a stethoscope that could clearly and distinctly hear the heartbeat of the earth. In tandem with the heartbeat of the earth, I could also hear baroque, electronic aural oscillations that may well have been the quaint susurrations of the spirits. Later in the trip I started to morph into other people. This type of experience tells me that our personalities are exchangeable in the space|time warp and weft of the 4-D. One of the last things I remembered from the night was the sound of myriad leaves and water moving in the distance.
“If we now put ourselves in the position of a client, with or without the influence of the ayahuasca brew, we notice that the characteristics of those songs can have an entrancing effect on our psyches. Their repetitious quality may be particularly soothing under ayahuasca in that they anchor the person’s experience into familiar patterns, which additionally offer alternative pathways for the activated archetypal psyche to follow. In this way, the icaros contribute in the structuring of the experience.”- Susana Bustos in Robert Tindall’s book, “The Jaguar That Roams The Mind”
Wednesday
After emerging from the insuperable blackness of deep, dreamless sleep, my mind felt reborn into a world of endless possibilities. The body felt devoid of impurities, pathogens, or coagulated waste. I pondered over Juan’s concentrated, saccharine, syrupy elixir of royal, bodhisattvic power. The fact that it was made from a vine that was over one hundred years old made it all the more interesting. One hundred years of accumulated plant wisdom was now in my bloodstream. How could an innocuous, clambering liana harness so much energy and trance-inducing chemical constituents? The world is mysterious. Vastly mysterious.
“Ayahuasca is frequently associated with violet auras and deep blue hallucinations; this suggests that ayahuasca may enable one to see at ultraviolet wavelengths, and that this substance may be visible only in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum.”- Terence and Dennis McKenna, “The Invisible Landscape”
The second ceremony of the ayahuasca double-header transpired on wednesday when the sun went down below the horizon. The potion par excellence was poured by Juan and delivered by his precocious daughter, Alexandria. Like the night before, it tasted almost sugary and sweet. However, unlike the night before, a phantasmagoric night that was still fresh in my mind, the brew took very little time to take effect. After about ten minutes the brew started to seep into the open channels of the psyche. One of the prevalent feelings of the initial ayahuasca inebriation involves an electrical surge that circumnavigates the body. After this surge is felt, the fetters of the mind usually fall to the wayside so the feathers of soul can emerge. The visions then come bubbling out of the unconscious recesses. When this happened to me on wednesday night, I immediately fell to my pillow and regaled in mental dimensions of cosmic proportions. The remainder of the trip charted a steady course with the psychedelic compass. For the most part, I viewed things sub specie aeternitate—from the perspective of eternity—where all time is compressed to a moment of dynamic simultaneity. I even detected conversations that transpired in the past between different people at the ceremony. I also felt closely connected to Jupiter. At certain points I could almost see its atmosphere, and see underneath its crust and mantle. When I fell asleep, I once again listened to the myriad leaves dancing.
I woke up feeling fully charged and speechless. Juan had delivered like only a great curandero can.
"The most common aspect of modified temporality encountered with ayahuasca is that of changes in the rate of time’s flow: time may be perceived to be moving either faster or slower than the clock would indicate. Usually the effect is that time moves faster. In other words, the person under the intoxication experiences lots of happenings and change, hence it seems to him or her that more time has passed than actually has. In extreme cases, it may seem that time has altogether stopped or that time and temporal distinctions are no longer relevant.”- Benny Shanon, “The Antipodes of The Mind”
Ayahuasca is a great vegetal spirit because its life is predicated upon the combination of two morphologically distinct plants. The ayahuasca vine is the male force that gives direction to the intoxication, and the chacruna leaves impart light and wisdom to the intoxication. The combination makes quite the quintessence. When imbibed in a traditional curanderismo ceremony where the shaman takes on the roles of performer and guide, the ayahuasca brew is strengthened and ameliorated by the knowledge of the shaman who made it and the power of his or her songs. For the record, Juan had very nice, lilting songs. Jim and Andre also showed unmistakable prowess in the icaro department as well.
Long live curanderismo and the exploratory human soul!
“The sun doctor moves easily through the world, unperturbed, seemingly able to open doors anywhere she wishes. A life filled with routines and good health, with attendance to detail and reliability, the sun doctor knows where she stands.
The moon doctor has no need for ground. Realities scatter before him like tarot cards in the wind. He flies to the stars and has his way with the Queen of Heaven in her celestial palace. The moon doctor rides dragons and knows his way through hell.”- Dale Pendell, “Pharmako Poeia”
1 comment:
Your a beautiful writer. Thanks.
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