So I'm dieting the tree from Avatar, and
eventually I turn into a panther, but we're gonna half to wait bit till I get
to that. We got a little prequel, and
then a some basic background on medicine land.
But eventually there will be a panther.
I promise.
The beach in Negril seemed like a great
place for ceremony. If you've been to
Negril, a town on the south west coast
on Jamaica, known in theory for it's long expanse of beach, beautiful cliffs,
but by those who've been as a place to have good dirty fun, you'd know how
ridiculous that idea was. The under
current is straight seedy sexy hustley.
But it seemed like the least bad option; since the last ceremony I'd
been to, which had basically sent me high taling it to Peru, I knew I needed to
stay well connected to the medicine and in my two weeks on the island, this
seemed like the best chance I had to find a place where I could sing and puke
unmolested.
I was drinking alone, and the intention
for the ceremony was to heal my relation with everything I found difficult
about Jamaica. I was back, my last stop
before finally making it to Peru, for first the time in a few years for the
wedding of two dear friends, I'd lived
and worked there on and off few a few years and been there twice before as a
backpacker. For the sake of brevity,
lets just say I'm not a fan of the island.
I was also less then fully onboard with
the ceremony. As had happened so many
times since returning from Peru last spring, I'd started out the day thinking
I'd have a ceremony, but as the day wore on, I thought of all the reasons this
wasn't the best day, realized I didn't really know the icaros as well as I
should, and then inevitably, thought about all the advantages of waking up at a
reasonable hour the next day and then discovered that it was later then it
should be. But I decided to go for it,
if for no other reason then to justify to myself having carried my precious
contraband to the country - I had
originally been inspired to have a ceremony for my friends there, but in the
chaos of weddingenss, and faced with the huge paradigm divide, I soon abounded the idea, but was left the
medicine and a certain sense of obligation it carried.
I carved myself a little seat in the sand
and got started. I was in an area in
front of a park, one of the few places that didn't get light from one of the
resorts. I poured myself the medicine,
which despite my having paid a princely sum for it in Iquitos, had been
remarkably not strong at the last ceremony I'd held with it. I stumbled my way thru a few icaros, but kept
thinking I saw things in the shadows, and getting distracted by the music or
the occasional beach stroller passing by.
None of it seemed dangerous, but I'd be lying if I said I was focused on
the ceremony. So I just bagged it. I threw up a little bit of water, packed up
my stuff, and walked back to my cabin.
I was wide awake, bored, and basically sober, so I decided to walk over
to that same loud party that had distracted me during the 'ceremony' bought
some pan chicken, a kind of smokey grilled chicken, which I swore most be
seasoned half with msg and half with crack - arguably the best thing about
Jamaica, and definitely not ayahuasca food, and paid six dollars which turned
out to be way to much to get into what
turned out to be a very loud, but totally dead party. About twenty minutes later, I left, bought
more pan chicken and dollars worth of weed from the pan chicken man and went
home and smoked a joint.
And then a a curious thing happened. Jamaican weed, despite it's lofty reputation,
tends to be some glassy eyed murky stuff.
But there was an odd clarity to the experience, and had a few of the
sort of classic medicine experience that I never have. I felt my body as an energy matrix that could
be broken down into hexagonal cells, and then sort of as waterfall off we might
as well call subatomic particles. It
was pretty faint, but it was that stuff that never happens to me. It lent credence to the idea the previous
ceremony had in fact opened me up to that whole previously hidden realm of
experiences, and that this one presented them, like something etched in glass,
barely visible, and the weed was sand blown over the glass that made the
etching visible. Didn't blow my mind,
buy I did kinda feel like a whole new light had turned on, albeit at the lowest
possible setting.
The rest of the trip, I found myself not
necessarily liking Jamaica better, but finding things and people about it that
I really enjoyed and connected too. To
be fair, Jamaica is nothing if not a dichotomous. The wonderful and awful are both well
abundant. Even my walk over to the party after the aborted ceremony had an effortless
quality to to it so very different then my standard experience in Jamaica, that
everything is if not war, at least well stressful. It always seems like you
have to argue and negotiate with everything.
I just by my admission, ate my chicken, bought my weed and was
good. So in an odd sense, it seemed
like the ceremony fulfilled it's purpose.
A few nights later I stayed with some
friends at these cabins at Hollywell park, which some people say is
haunted. And I had the strangest dream -
I was in this cartoon world, distinctly felt like there where these clothespin
ghosts rendered in line drawings, that were preparing to molest me. Eventually I woke up scared and horny. How very Jamaican. I've been places that are supposedly haunted
and never felt anything. It seemed
consistent with my new energetic/spirt awareness that all sorts of things would
be visible now.
But all that is just an incidental
prelude to Peru,
The journey was comfortingly
familiar. Same Delta flight as last
year, same five hours half asleep at the 24 hours Starubucks (an odd ritual
given my destination) at the Lima airport attempting to do all the
communicating I'd meant to do for months using their free wi-fi. Got phone credit from the same Claro
kiosk. Bought the same cheap ticket to
Iquitos on Star Peru and at six thirty in the morning found myself stumbling
again into an empty row of their oddly inviting all beige pleather seats and
alternating between passing out and waking up really needing to pee, a need
frequently thwarted by their same bizarrely enthusiastic enforcement of the
fasten seat belt sign for far to much of the hour and change flight.
Iquitos airport is small and easy to
manage. I called Carlos, who runs the
Ayahuasca Foundation where I'd studied last year. By some kind of divine providence, he was
headed out in half and hour in a chartered bus to Enrique's camp, my
destination, which is 72 kilometers out of town on the Cataherra, the only real
road (Iqutios is, like the T-shirts at the Karma Cafe say "Deep in da'
Jungle"; asides from the Cataherra, which connects it the little town of
Nauta, a hundred kilometers away, it's only accessible by boat or plane). It's not that hard to get to Enrique's, but
this was like the jungle saying welcome back, we've been waiting for you. I took a Moto Karo, which is the underpowered
motorcycle made into a tricycle to hold three passengers plus luggage that is
the standard means of transport here into town - the driver didn't even try to
charge me a tourist rate. He did try to
offer a hotel, a jungle guide and everything else under the sun until after my
repeating it about the third time, he finally understood that I didn't need
anything. It was very comforting
moment. It was my third trip to Peru,
and the first two and had been decidedly more exploratory. Along with all the miracles and spiritual
opening ayahuasca travel tales abound with stories of shysty shamans, and
unscrupulous hustlers, and occasionally the horrific (google Chimbre); although I'd never had any experiences that
I'd call worse then mediocre, I'd spent a lot time cruising around and
gossiping with my fellow travelers trying to find something better then
ok. A lot of ayahuasca centers
specialize in people who are coming down for a week or three, to experience the
medicine, to learn a little about themselves, or to heal something. I started out that way, at a ten day retreat,
which seemed fine at the time, I got a lot of great stuff out of it and the
people running the place at that the time were great, but having been around
the block a few times, I definitely am not headed back there. Still probably the most intense ceremonies
I've experienced to date. On the second
trip I'd been looking for something deeper, more thorough; I was looking for
some one to properly apprentice with.
After sifting about for a month or so, I'd walked out of my hotel and run
into Theresa, a sweet but infuriatingly persistent local jewelry vendor talking
to a guy named Laser who said something like 'hello, do you want to come out to
a camp with me and do a couple ceremonies?'
He and I have since talked about what transpired next repeatedly. Normally, any sane person when asked this
question usually asks a bunch of questions about where, how much, the shamans
training. I wouldn't say ayahuasca is
dangerous, but like anyone you're gonna share an extremely intimate evening with
she has the possibility to take you a lot of different places, so it some
consideration is definitely recommended.
What happened instead, was with about much consideration as lobotomized
gnat on Thorzine can muster in half a heart beat, I said 'Yeah, sounds great.'
I tell him it was because I liked his t-shirt - I think it was a laughing
buddha, but the truth is, I have a lot of faith in my gut instincts, and my
instincts said that he was a great guy, and that he'd done his homework, and if
he thought this Enrique guy was worth my time, he probably was.
A day later I met Enrique for the first
time, and boy were the guts accurate.
The ceremonies didn't have some of the thunder and lighting of other
places I'd been, but there was a strength and surety, coupled with a gentleness
that seemed solid in a way that nothing else had. About week later I was enrolled in the six
week course he was teaching, which was put together by Carlos, the guy I was
currently en route to meet. Enrique's tradition, and what the course taught was
straight up Shipibo vegetalista curanderismo.
Shipibo being the largest and
most intact of the Amazonian tribes. They
are also generally considered to have the strongest plant medicine. I've heard people say that when the curanderos
from other tribes are really sick, they ask to be brought to a Shipibo
healer. I don't know whether they are
they are the most numerous and seem to have the most intact tradition because
there medicine was the strongest, or whether they survived because there were
the most of them, but I do know they are generally considered to be the final
word. Vegetalista, or vegetlismo means
one who works with, of the tradition of working with plants for healing. Healing emotional wounds, energetic
parasites, but more often, things like diabetes and cancer; although the
distinction between these two sets of things is much less in the Shipibo world
then it is in ours. All in all though, the tradition is a lot less interested
in the kind of spiritual exploration that westerners, myself included, are
often looking for when they come to the medicine. Shipibo culture is so organically spiritual,
that to take a plant just for that experience isn't really necessary. In Spanish 'curar' means to heal, so a
'curandero' is a healer and curanderismo is the healing tradition. This is the word that is used here as we
would use 'shaman', which is actually a Mongolian word meaning 'skywalker'
- apparently they have some pretty
serious shamans in Mongolianland; check out the movie 'The Horse Boy' it's an amazing story. So… six weeks of Shipibo vegetilsta
curandersimo. And although the course is
really just an introduction, I finally feel like I have some kind of map of
this world, and I had my people. So I
most emphatically didn't need any suggestions from the moto karo driver as to
where to go. I knew where I was
going. I was going home.
The ceremonies on the course were
magical, but what often stroke me more is the space afterwards where everyone
is so open and real. I could pretty much
say my whole life is about trying to get to that space, and in a nutshell, most
of my frustration in life is about not being able to find it. In Peru, especially after ceremonies, I talk
all the time. I tell people here I don't
talk much in the states, and they don't believe me. But I'm so excited to have the standard way
of interacting be profound and honest that I can't shut up. Even if I'm not yapping, I still have this
happy dancing puppy dog feeling.
This time I felt like that before the
ceremony even started. It was good to
see old friends. It was good to be surrounded by nature. It was good to be where everything is real.
My first ceremony back in Peru was
epic. Or at least it's exit was. The insults to my guts left by weeks of
greasy meaty sugary Jamaican food, rum and hip hop video consciousness levels
exploded out of me with thermonuclear force.
Just as it was subsiding, Laser came up to ask if I was ok. Words were a murky improbability. A good
purge is like a bolt of lighting.
There's nothing else going on. As
the circuits reset, I fumbled thru the ether and eventually found English: I
was on my way to the bathroom but then I had to throw up, the words
crystalizing the reality around me: as often happens, language is a structuring
force onto itself; both evidence of and catalytic to my returning to
navigability. Laser seemed to think it
had been a lot of throwing up, which was kind of reassuring to know I hadn't
totally lost perspective; it had seemed pretty insane to me as well. I felt immediately better afterwards, as is
often the case. Now that I think about
it, it would make more sense if people comforted pre puke not post - that's
when you're actually feeling bad. I
guess also I'm lucky in way. My purges
tend to be intense and decisive. I'm not
fucking around, and I when I'm done, the work is done.
And so was my ceremony. I had purged pretty early on, and gotten rid
of pretty much all the medicine along with the Jamaican vibes. A second cup wasn't offered ( the consensus
amongst those who kept it in their belly, was that medicine was super
strong.) And I was left with what we
call the twinkley-dinks - only the slightest sense of the medicine typified by
faint unremarkable patterns of light.
It's generally talked about with frustration; it's kind of the
ceremonial equivalent of purgatory.
BORE-ing. I, with my high
tolerance to DMT/ lack of sensitivity to the spirits, depending on who you ask,
am always trying to get a clearer line with god. But this time it really didn't bother
me. I knew I had months a head of me,
but more then that I knew that this ceremony and the next week or so, I was
really just gonna be a spectator to the main show which was that Carlos, who
after ten years of living in the Amazon had managed to achieve what is
basically the holy grail for ayahuasca drinkers, he had gotten his whole
fucking family to leave their right brained reality behind in the the states
for a week or two, and come down to the jungle to drink the juice. All three brothers and his one living parent.
Carlos is healer, he runs a healing school, and has heal and changed countless
peoples lives, mine amongst them. But as
far as I could tell what he most wanted to do was have his family come down and
get healed. I was content to watch the
miracle that was unfolding. And they
had quite a night. Quite a week as well.
Let me introduce the characters: They are all outstanding human beings; His
Dad's in pretty good shape though he eats junk, and so far relatively minor
heath problems that go with that; glucose levels thru the roof and whatnot,and
and he has limes disease. The oldest
brother Ace is doing pretty well too. He's a jock, strong, competitive,
works as an investment banker spoils his kids. He was the one who flew
right, though he's not the most emotionally expressive guy, he would appear to
be all around the most ok. Next, Grizzly, also works in finance, though
lost his job in the last crash. Had a portfolio and makes his living off
that and - it's a weird family - ebaying the four tractor trailer loads of
solar equipment his dad bought on auction when solar start up when belly up
when the technology changed faster then they did. Grizzly is also a
serious alcoholic and coke head, as well as over weight. Apparently he
manages his life relatively well - he like all of them profess to love his wife
and kids have pretty good relationships with them, but his health is terrible.
Carlos said the way he got him to come down was by writing to point out
that if he continued on the path he was on he would not live to give his
daughters away at their wedding. And then T-bar who lost his job and
savings and his home in the financial crisis (ironically he was a mortgage broker)
and has been going down hill ever since. Not so much drugs, though when
he was leaving he did say he was gonna cut back on or maybe quite smoking weed.
He lost his sense of self worth when he lost his income. Apparently
the nail in the coffin was when he couldn't afford to go home I forget if was
for his mothers' funeral of before she died (her death is it's own saga - and
Ill tell you that story another time). I guess he kinda went off a cliff
after that, and started to have grand mal seizures on a regular basis,
including one at the top of a staircase. He has a lot more stitches then
he used to and wife was freaking out. As is usually the case in these
types of stories, western medicine did not have a lot to offer. He said
they just kept upping the dosage on his downers everytime he had another
seizure. Apparently he was at something like 6x the recommended dose.
Said he couldn't even function.
Apparently
Enrique looked into T-bar's head during a ceremony said that there was big
nerve that was broken, and that occasionally the wires would spark across one
another and T-bar would have a seizure. I have to say in a literal sense that
doesn't make so much sense to me, particularly because T-bar said you can kinda
feel them building before hand and to my knowledge your brain is more a mass of
neurons then discreet large nerves, but shamanic anatomy is often simpler then
western anatomy, and also that was the thrice translated version and given that
the basic tool of hearing here is a song, as opposed to a scalpel, I can sort
of let this settle as loose metaphor. Broken energetic connection.
Anyways Enrique said he would reconnect the wires and gave T-bar a bunch
or turtle hearts, the same thing he gave my friend Laser to cure his epilepsy.
And that definitely worked. He was well into his treatment when I got
there and he seemed to think he was better. Apparently he was over all
much happier as well, had lost a good amount of weight and felt like he had a
new zest for life. Its kind of hard for me to know how you're over a
randomly occurring event with no continuos symptoms, but he seemed to believe
it. And given that by all appearances, the whole thing had an absolutely
emotional source, it makes that sense that getting his mojo back would go along
way on it's own.
Grizzly, of
cocaine and ebay had a really rough first ceremony, but he was fine in the
morning and went back in the next night. I don't know exactly what
happened, but at some point he also seemed to have a complete turn around in
his life perspective, and decided to give up the coke and the booze, eat
healthier food and I guess rekindle the relationship with his wife which had
been dwindling. Apparently the biggest obstacle was that his best friend
was even deeper into the blow then him, had no interest in stoping. They
would watch the Patriots games and get
destroyed. That sounds like about as
much fun as dentistry without Novocain to me, but to each their own; the
whole family are big sports fans. They actually all went back to Iquitos on
Sunday and spent the night in a hotel so they could watch the Patriots play the
AFC (or maybe NFC) game - it was the one that would get them in super bowl.
Apparently the football season being over was going to make it easier to
kick the habits. He also said his wife didn't know - how he pulls that
off I have no idea. Also, I always
thought half the point of getting high was to do it with the people you get
naked with. He was glowing when he left, but quitting bad habits is lot
of work. But he seemed to want to and be excited about it, as opposed to
feeling like he ought to, and he was getting his sights on the positive -
healthier body, better relationship with wife, more money, getting to see his
daughters grow up. So we shall see. I'm cautiously optimistic.
Ayahuasca has a pretty good record for addiction treatment, though it's
not the magic bullet that ibogaine is.
Ace, the jock,
seemed to have changed the least. He seemed like he was in the best
shape. And like all of them, he seemed
like a stellar guy. He was really supportive over all, and I think
resolved to be a little healthier. He also called up his Dad's girlfriend
and said he'd pay her to throw out all the junk food in the house and replace
it with healthy food. Surgeons use scalpels, Shamans use songs, and
bankers use money.
The dad was sort
of the least participatory. He did one
ceremony, and said that when he started to see things flying around, he just
went to his room and went to sleep. He did, in sort of not quite done,
tinkering dad way instal a series of solar power systems, that supposedly will
have us off generator pretty much all the time.
But his dad was neat. Last year, Carlos said that his dad
was working with some people who seemed to have viable cold fusion solution.
Cold fusion, being a nuclear reaction that makes whole stable atoms
(meaning, no nuclear waste) while releasing nuclear reaction amounts of heat.
If it's real, it's gonna make the internal combustion engine seem a stone
age joke. I read a little bit about it last summer, and the media didn't
seem to optimistic. But apparently his company is brining it both to NASA
(he used to work for them) and the Naval Research Lab, both of whom seem to
think they can make it work. Free, or at least really cheap energy would
pretty much be a complete upheaval in the world financial structure. And
for desert, the other thing his company does is transmutation. They don't
do lead into gold, but the they can do iron into platinum. They can do
gold too, but apparently that's illegal. So his company is straight
inventing the future. But that's really just an aside. When he left his glucose levels were in much
better shape and the limes was apparently pretty managed.
Anyways, it was
great having the whole family here, and they did all seem to transform and heal
quite a bit. And it really demonstrated
that families heal as a group. They were
also all great people. I mean ayahuasca mostly brings out the best in
people, but still, they were great. And I do think they're all in
significantly better shape for their time here. There was an over all
decision for everyone to become healthier.
The other thing
that was cool about the family thing, was that it legitimatized a lot of what
Carlos was up to in his families mind, and therefore in his own. His
family rocks pretty hard. Brother's a banker. Dad's patenting the
future. You've spent ten years in the jungle doing something no one
understands. Family comes down. People heal. Suddenly your world
is more real. It was good shit. He
said that what he really wanted was that when someone in the family was sick,
they would call him. And he felt like
now they would.
Nuff about all
those other people. Let get to that panther...
A few hours after
I arrived I talked to Enrique, and said I wanted to stay for about a month and
diet a particular plant. He seemed to
think this was a good plan which honestly was a relief. It's a super powerful plant, I felt I'd been
a little wayward, and wasn't sure I'd get the go ahead. We settled on price (jungle medicine, like
western medicine is a cash money business), and I was installed.
So here's a
little more to background. Plant Diets.
Diets here really have nothing to do with what we call diets in the
states, although you do as relatively insignificant side effect loose weight.
Different people have different protocols, but basically you cut down
your stimulation, i.e. by living in hut in the jungle, then you drink a tea
made from the plant in question, and then you limit what you eat, and
then you hang out and listen to what the plant says to you. In this case
Enrique said I should drink the plant twice a day for three days without eating
anything, and then once a day for three days while I got to eat blandness
itself - rice, potatoes, farina (chopped up fermented, dried yucca) hard boiled
eggs, quinoa, lentils and limes all with nothing, especially not salt oil or
sugar. Although apparently now I can also eat chicken and vegetables,
which is a godsend. I'll continue
to with said diet until I finish. Some people do it in total isolation,
some people do it where you can't touch anyone, and some people fast the whole
time. What I'm doing is sometimes called a social diet, and in sense it's on the easy peasy end of
the spectrum. Apparently Enrique asked
the plants to makes things easier for us westerners. He's cool like that. He's definitely a badass, but he's not into
making you're life unnecessarily difficult.
There is also a suspicious convenience in what he negotiates with the
plants. Basically he's like look, these
guys come from another culture and they don't have twenty years to spend
sitting along in hut, so we got fast track it - we've got the IMF and fast food
storming the gate. I don't know if those
were the exact words he used but that's the general idea. About negotiating with plants - well, even
talking to them. Eventually you get to
the place where you can literally have conversation with plant spirits. And although they have pretty strong
feelings, they have personalities, and can be reasoned with. Granted in the west this is indistinguishable
from a diagnosis of clinical insanity, but it is the basis for this whole cultures'
understanding of the world. The
traditions teach that the plants taught them pretty much everything they know,
most especially how to heal with plants.
Apparently tobacco was the first teacher, taught people to make
ayahuasca. A plant also taught Enrique
how to cure AIDS. Apparently he was just
hanging out one day and the plant was like - do you wanna know how to cure AIDS
- literally just like that. I believe
they've done it here once. Supposed to
take about six weeks but the guy didn't follow his diet so it wound up taking
eight. You can see why Carlos wants his
family to call him when they're sick. I would not say I have personally
experienced this type of communication with plants - were still in the gaga
-gogo stage, but there's something going on. And it seems like it will
develop. Also, to be complete, I did not
directly witness the AIDS cure, but it's talked about in pretty day to day way
by pretty sane people, and I've seen enough other supposedly impossible
healings that I don't have any trouble accepting it. Back to Enrique and convenient messages
- he also apparently got a message from
god that he was supposed to teach westerners this tradition. Great idea, and I have to say, a lot more
lucrative then teaching it to other Shipibos.
But all in all, I'd say his integrity is at least as good as any of the
other curanderos I've met. And the net
result is this most effective propagation of said tradition in the history of
time as far as I know. Seems like
it's worth a living wage. But, we're
talking about dieting. The idea of the
diet is you're trying to tune into the plants frequency - remember, you want to
talk to them. Since plants can't enjoy the types of bodily pleasures we
do, specifically food and sex, you don't have sex and make the food as bland as
possible. There is this additional thing about nutrient depravation, which
teaches you to rely more on plant or spirit energy instead of the regular stuff
that keeps us going. The limiting of input also makes it easier to tune into
the plants more subtle communication.
You have to be quite so you can hear god's whisper type thing.
There also also
this completely different thing called a healing diet. which is less strict and
are for treating a medical issue.
Healing diets are basically just no salt no sugar no oil no sex. To be honest I don't know a whole lot about
the logic of them, but those are the rules.
There is also
this idea of an 'ayahusca diet', which for the most part is just famous western
misunderstanding. I mean there are
definitely things you don't want to eat before ceremony, like aged cheesed and
I think fava beans, and anything containing thiamin I believe, and anything
fermented can be a little rough, and pork is definitely bad, and clean diet
will help, and yes anti depressants will kill you. No joke. And there are people, including
Carlos who think that following something like a healing diet will help, but
Enrique sure doesn't think so. When a
lot of people talk about an 'ayahuasca diet', they're generally totally
confused - usually they're applying the strictures of the plant diet the
ayahuasca diet. Retarded. I've seen a shaman down grilled duck and oily
rice before a ceremony. It was a great
ceremony.
So blah blah
blah. The rules aren't that
interesting. What is is interesting is
the result. And that I'm dieting the tree from Avatar.
It's legendary, it's official name is Noyarou, but one of it's many names
is the God of Gods. It's considered to
be the most powerful tree in the forest. People talk about other plant spirits getting
jealous of each other and things.
Apparently if Noyarou just blasts
everyone else out of there. Oh, and it
glows in the dark. Call James
Cameron. Apparently there's not English,
Latin or even a Spanish name for it.
It's often considered to be extinct - although after Enrique bough this
property he found three of them here, which he took as very good sign.
Being Enrique, he doesn't want any Peruvians to know anything about it.
Gringos are fine, because he wants us to come study. But he's
afraid if anyone from here finds out, some one might come steal the soul of the
tree. There is a lot cloak and dagger stuff here with a gnarly science
fiction element. Basically, if you're not the best curandero, you can
work harder, or you can just steal other peoples magic. Like many things
I hear about here, I haven't witnessed anything like this directly, but I've
talked with people who's take on reality seemed pretty grounded who and have,
and I have to say, the longer I'm here, the more sense these things make.
I've often been confused by the complete lack of community or solidarity
amongst curanderos. Up until quite
recently I really wanted to work to do something about that; everybody does
when they first come down here. But I
was talking to Enrique the other night and he we like - well, there's really no
upside to knowing other curanderos. .
People are jealous, greedy and (magic) power hungry, and the more people
who know you, the more likely you are to get attacked (in plant world) or have
you're power stolen or some other crazy shit.
This may seem a little crazy, but Apparently Enrique's brother had all
his visions stolen by another curandero at some point. I
know plenty of people, who well have the wits about then who have said they've
been attacked by brujeria (black magic) in ceremony. Enrique said his mom (he comes from a long
line of curanderos) was killed by brujeria.
I don't quite understand the details, but it sounded like they used a
small poisonous snake. I'm not sure if
this snake was visible in the world most people inhabit. I am sure his mom is dead. If you live in this world, it's pretty much
understood that brujeria is part of the territory. So you have your own little clan, and you
don't really fuck with anyone else.
Curanderos are referred to as
Dons - it implies a certain status.
And I have to say, there role does a have a bit common with the mafia
Don. They have a lot of power, they run
their little world, and they keep their shit safe from the very real threat of
other all the other Dons. Ayahuasca is
beautiful medicine, and there's a lot of great stuff and great people down
here; although it may be the Enchanted Forest, Amazonia sure as hell ain't
Disneyland.
We went to
see the tree other night and it was some straight up fairy tale shit. The
forest was pitch black, but all around us on the ground were this shimmering
leaves. It was more like lots of stars then a blanket, but it was enough
to make you believe in magic. And you could totally feel the energy
coming off the tree as well. I picked up a few leaves. Later then
night I put them in front of myself when I was meditating and focused on them
and the energy of the trees for the second half of the meditation. And
some weird really cool shit happened. I felt like my body opened
up/evaporated and this column of energy came into me and made me stronger (I
guess that's the stuff I'm supposed to be living on know as apposed to
nutrients). And that was pretty crazy, but later when I feel asleep I had
this dream that I was at a party and suddenly I was really thirsty and all the
water was muddy and then I kind peeled in half from the top and this mass of
black smoke came out of me. And then when I came back together I was like
a monster. Not a mean monster, but monstrously strong, like I big cat,
a Panther. I had an experience like that during a San Pedro a two
years ago, but I was stone sober this time. At some point I woke up, and
I still had that Panther energy, and then also some kind of big bird of prey
energy as well. Both things made me chest feel super big and strong and
armor plated. I was way to wired to go back to sleep and I spent a bunch
of time hanging out in the moloko contemplating my current existence as a
predator. Because along with the new body, I had this very see- focus-
attack energy. That energy was actually how my first panther started.
It was a little freaky that time, but this time I had the approach down.
I mean that same energy could easily make you angry or get in fights or
punch walls for no reason. But it's kind of like driving 150 miles and
hour - as long as the roads are good, and you're in ferrari, and you stay calm
you'll be fine. Weird metaphor, but basically the thing with hunting
instinct is as long as your calm and balanced it good stuff. When it goes
awry you're the local thug. Eventually went to sleep. Woke up
feeling peaceful as baby. The next time I was in ceremony it was super
feline, squiggly energy. This place is kind of a roller coaster ride
thru different parts of yourself. One of the things I've realized that if
you're freaked out that you feel like a lethal hunter tonight, don't
worry, you'll feel like a wiggly girl who loves purple the next.
I talked to
Enrique about it. Didn't quite get all that he said, but basically he
said that the plants were strengthening and protecting me. That the black
smoke was bad juju leaving me, and that that panther was protecting me and
making me stronger and something I didn't quite get about how since panthers
can eat anything, - apparently they have quite the digestive track - that
I would be able to eat anything too. I didn't know if he meant food wise
or energy wise. I do know that I got chicken for dinner the next night. I'm actual gonna get a better
translation when Laser shows up. Anyways, he seemed pretty excited.
That's all for
now - I was gonna get into the ceremonies, but I've realized all this writing
is taking me away from being focused on being here, so I'll write more when I
get out of here in about a week...