For anyone who somehow doesn’t know, the Susi French Connection plays the finest in 1970′s AM Gold hits for your enjoyment, for which I love them. They also happen to frequently let me sing at least one of them, for which I love them even more. They’ll be at Eddie’s Attic in Atlanta this Saturday for two shows: an all-ages 7pm show and all-adult 9pm show (which should not be construed as meaning anyone will be naked). If you don’t make it out, it will only go to show that you just don’t like yourself very much and it will also make me a very lonely boy, indeed…

Advance tickets can be purchased here:
Early show: http://t.co/ROZGNixP
Late show: http://tfus.co/1AZUOii

This is the best representation of an ayahuasca experience I have found, so I thought I’d share it with you.

Like the icaros I mentioned last time, I have no idea what watching this video will be like for someone who hasn’t experienced the actual ceremony. I’ve seen videos that were supposed to ‘simulate’ LSD visions and they tend to not come across to me as anything more than, wow, that was a weird little video. I expect you may feel the same about the above. What I can tell you is that when I watched it the first time it really resonated with me. In actuality, the visions I had during the ceremonies weren’t especially like these at all, as far as I can recall. But there is something about the way this is presented (and it’s not just the graphics, it’s the whole mix of the music and the silences and the movement in the video) that feels very right to me. The first time I saw it there was actually a point (starting about 2:30 in, in case you’re curious) at which I could feel the mareación again, just out of reach.

Anyway, I’m sharing it here just on the off chance that it’s helpful, in any way, in understanding what I’m about to try and describe.

The brew for the second ceremony was the first of the batch we had helped to make that morning. I only drank about half as much as I did the first night. I was still operating under the idea that this really wasn’t much more than an extremely strong acid trip, and when I made the snap decision to go ahead and participate in the second night I figured a lesser dose would mean less nausea and I’d still probably have some interesting visions. What I didn’t really understand at the time was that for many people ayahuasca, once it’s in their system, affects them cumulatively. Another thing I didn’t know was that the batch we’d made turned out to be especially potent.

Initially, the second night was a continuation of the first. The room and everyone in it seemed connected in a very real and deep way. The visions were filled with brightest colors, psychedelic in the truest sense of the word. The room ebbed and flowed much as it had the night before, the noise of people purging swelling and fading in time with the icaros. But these things were only the earliest stages and if that had been all there was there wouldn’t really be much point in me having written all this. Very quickly, things got much more powerful.

For some, the night was rough. Behind me, the girl who’d asked if she needed to participate in another ceremony went through an absolutely awful experience. She spent most of the night crying and begging for it to stop, as Malcolm and the woman with the friendly face tried to calm her and lead her through it. I know one person who felt the night got away from Hamilton, that he wasn’t dealing seriously enough with what they felt was a palpable darkness in the room. Elsewhere, one of the Russian guests called out repeatedly to his friends (in Russian, I only found out later what it was about), who giggled around him, because he didn’t know where he was. Apparently, back where the bathrooms were the scene was especially grim, with people strewn all around the floor, lost in their own particular vision.

For others, though, the night was incredibly positive. I was one of them. The oddity of it is that I was still aware of what was negative around me, but processed through what was going on in my mind the tone was completely different. For those that I could hear clearly suffering I tried to extend myself towards them, tried to share the feelings I was having. The volume of purging that seemed to be going on in the back sounded almost comical at times, and the laughter that would move through the room after an especially loud burst of it said I wasn’t alone in thinking so. Hamilton’s icaros did seem to verge on being outright flippant, but in the end it was Don Alberto’s voice I was really following. I began to travel, and his icaros became like a rope to hold onto while walking, to remind myself which direction to go.

I read a description recently by someone comparing the LSD experience to the ayahuasca experience, and something they said really struck me. They talked about how LSD, peyote, and other psychedelics were still close to reality, that they embellish reality with their peculiarities. But ayahuasca takes you to another reality completely.

In other words, we’ve reached the point at which you’ll keep walking with me through this or else be unable to suspend disbelief.

I moved back and forth between several different vignettes, they seemed almost like different rooms and later that’s how I would come to refer to them. Actually, I say I was moving but I think it’s more accurate to say that I was still laying there on the mat and these different rooms moved through me. It’s also important to know that these rooms were real. They did not feel like hallucinations at all, there was solidity and atmosphere to them. Unfortunately, these days I have only the vaguest sense of most of them, faint flashes of memory I sometimes still get that I have no hope of trying to describe, but two of them still stand in my mind.

One was peaceful and quiet. It was lit by a late summer dusk light that filtered through windows I couldn’t see and diffused the room with an ashy, colorless glow. My viewpoint of the room was from the floor, a floor that was made up of pillows. In a far corner of the room these pillows, which were also somehow burlap sacks, gathered together and formed a large chair that rose from floor to ceiling. The chair was shaped like an open lotus, if a lotus were a chair, each petal made of one of the plain, off-white burlap pillows. At the crown of it was a symbol I didn’t recognize, lines and shapes that placed together formed something like a spade or an upside down heart. The chair looked like a throne merely waiting for a Buddha. I loved it there. Of all the rooms that shifted before me, it was the one I most longed to return to again and again, though it never came when I tried to get there. Instead it seemed to arrive in those moments when the ceremony would peak and then begin to slowly subside into a brief rest. The sounds around me would begin to grow quiet and I would find myself laying there again before the lotus in “the waiting room” (the name I gave it later in trying to describe it to Sarah), happy and surprised each time, as Don Alberto’s soft whisper-whistle slithered its way around me.

I called it “the waiting room” because it stood in contrast to the other room I remember, one I will never be a good enough writer to describe effectively. I knew intuitively it was a kind of operating room. I floated in stasis, hovering but prone. Just now I started to say the room was dark, but realized that sentence would have several things wrong with it. The room was black, but not dark, I could see perfectly, well enough to tell that I couldn’t make out the outer edge of the “room.” Lines of light circled around me constantly, crisscrossing and shifting directions in angles and circles, a kind of living geometric display. I understood them to be living because they were the ones operating on me. They were beings I could barely comprehend, making up a sort of sacred mathematical sphere that surrounded me, made up of a multitude of beings I couldn’t distinguish one from another. The sensation of their presence was at once overwhelming and soothing.

I know that’s one of those annoying contradictions you often see in spiritual writings, but as they operated on me I felt sadness and joy in equal amounts. It was a painful discomfort that was overpowered by the immense sense of wonder at watching them work.

There was a sort of distance to their attention towards me, created, I think, by the fact that their consciousness was so far above mine. It was as if you, as a three-dimensional being, somehow felt compassion for a one-dimensional point, and had found a way to express that compassion to it. There would be a kind of necessary remoteness to the compassion that ‘point’ felt coming from you, separated as it would be from you by barriers it couldn’t even perceive.

They were aware of this distance between us from my perspective and tried, at one point, to reassure me. One of the shapes split off from the whole and moved towards me, a circle forming near my head. It “looked” at my face for a moment and a line formed across its surface, mimicking a smile. I couldn’t help but laugh at the sight of it, and somehow I knew that it scarcely understood what a “smile” was, only that it would comfort me. I was full of the inescapable knowledge that they loved me and wanted me to be better.

I would shift between these various rooms seemingly in time with the icaros, sometimes settling back into myself there in the ceremony hut, attempting to empathetically reach out to those around me who seemed to be struggling. At times my thoughts would begin to turn, my cynical mind would attempt to assert itself weakly, and outside in the jungle the same nocturnal bird from the night before would laugh its gently mocking laugh. Next to me, Sarah would laugh in response, the exact same laugh, and then it would ripple through the mass of people laying around me.

Cynicism, self-importance, they had no place there. We were all of us connected, the mass of us connected to the jungle, the jungle to the universe. Far above, the godhead looked down upon me and I was naked before it, aging, sad and overweight. But I saw my tiny body through its eyes and realized everything I hated about myself, it loved because it had made it so. It loved us all, because how could it do anything else?

The godhead stretched out a finger towards me, its tiny child, and poked me in the belly to make me laugh.

Next: I talk about a high school book report, the man who wrote Blade Runner, and possibly the happiest day of my life.

As you’ve probably realized, I’ve started playing music again. When I more or less stopped playing a few years ago, email was still the best method for communicating with fans. I feel like, at this point, that’s no longer the case.

I know a lot of people follow both my personal Facebook page as well as my Facebook music page. Some of those people also follow me on Twitter, possibly even Google+. I try to vary what I post on any given service, so people don’t end up seeing the same thing in fifty different places, but at the same time I’m aware of how much ‘noise’ there is on these services and I want to make sure that people who want to know about things like shows, or new music, or whatever are able to find out.

I try to make sure I post the more important stuff to my Facebook music page and Twitter, while trying to walk that fine line between making sure it’s seen and annoyingly repeating myself over and over. But I’ve been terrible so far with updating Google+ and I haven’t updated MySpace in god knows how long. I suspect there are other places I ought to use that I don’t even know about. It’s a little unnerving to admit to being so un-hip, but there you have it.

Most importantly, while trying to get information out, I’d really prefer that we all felt there was some sense of actual communication going on, rather than it just being a glorified internet telephone pole with show posters all over it.

What I’m trying to ask is, well, I don’t even know… If you’re a musician, writer, artist, fan, friend, or someone who’s simply stumbled on this post but finds the background colors of this site somehow hypnotic, what’s your advice? What’s your opinion?

A few weeks ago I went and did some backing vocals for another musician in the studio. While we were all talking, the topic of this trip (no pun intended) came up. It was the first time I tried to describe much of it to anyone. Until then I’d usually let Sarah tell her story because it covered most of the details people wanted and was also much funnier and, you know, story-like. Most importantly, it existed, unlike my story which I hadn’t really managed to work through at all. So as I sat there in the studio I tried to explain some things, and was talking about the icaros when I realized I had recordings of some on my iPad (not the ones from our ceremonies, just some I’d found online, and why I had them is something I’ll try to explain before I’m done with all this). Before I played a little of them, I said, “Look, I don’t have any idea what these will sound like for you. When I listen to them I don’t just hear them, there’s a lot of other stuff attached to them that I feel, so when you hear them they may just sound like a random guy singing native songs pulled from a PBS documentary.”

That’s how I feel about trying to explain all of this, in particular the second ceremony. These are just words describing something that happened to me, possibly they’re funny and interesting, but do they convey what it felt like? Because that’s really the crucial part. That’s what made it all matter, that’s what made me so fucked up as the time passed after I came back home and I couldn’t feel it any more, and that’s what has made such a huge difference over the past couple of months as I’ve reconnected to that feeling and processed more and more of what I learned. Without that, this is just a wacky drug story, which is fine, I suppose, but not really what I’m hoping to get across.

Nothing to do, really, but try and write.

**********

I wrote the above a month ago.

I think what stalls me over and over is the idea that trying to put that second night into words ends up belittling it. That no description I can give it will contain any part of the experience I had. Last night, I was reading “The Doors of Perception” by Aldous Huxley before I fell asleep, because I’m still trying to process, still trying to learn, still trying to get perspective and create permanence for the whole thing. I was struck by this passage…

“By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies–all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.”

…and later by this…

“However expressive, symbols can never be the things they stand for.”

In the end, what I want is to GIVE MY EXPERIENCE IN PERU TO YOU, and I can’t. It can’t be anything other than just a story for you. I don’t know why that should be so important to me, or maybe it’s more accurate to say I do know but feel as if it’s been foolish to expect I could.

So, why keep writing? That seems like a fair question. The answer, really, is that part of processing this has been finally writing about it and trying to convey it to myself as much as to anyone reading. I re-read all of these posts tonight in an attempt to jumpstart writing about it and it seemed, at least to me, that I could see my tone change over the course of writing. Those first few posts don’t read with the same “voice” to me that seems to be speaking in the more recent ones, something that seems even funnier to me now as I notice that they’re only two months old. The cynic in me says I’m imagining it, but of course he rarely shuts up about this sort of thing and, anyway, I’ve learned a lot of valuable things about the cynic in me over the past year, which I’ll come to eventually in the course of all this nonsense you’re reading.

Somewhere along the way I forgot, if I ever knew, how to just write for myself, with no purpose other than to express something to myself, and to count managing to express it to anyone else as an unexpected bonus. So, like I said a month ago, nothing to do, really, but try and write. If you’re still reading: thanks, sorry for the delay, and more soon, I promise.

Next: The second ceremony.

Also, I’ve been updating my Tumblr account as I’ve been writing, if you’re a completist. >>

I was still very drugged. I didn’t understand how all of these people were walking around unaffected. Things weren’t quite as deep as they had been but my sense of the passage of time was still pretty messed up. Seconds and minutes seemed to expand and retract to suit their own whims. The room itself seemed to sway between well lit and still dark. And my nausea was still extremely real. I lay on the mat, with my stomach full of earthquake pills, only occasionally shifting position and trying not to make anything internal angry with me. Finally, my brain made a decision. Get up. It’s time. Get in the bathroom.

I stood up as slowly as possible and tried to get my reality legs under me. I made my way to one of the stalls in back and sat down. The stall was nothing more than a toilet with tile walls close enough to touch without extending my arms. I felt exhausted and drained, I think I would have been perfectly happy spending the rest of the night sitting there. I could hear the random conversations still going on in the main room. As I sat there, my nausea would come and go, talking of Michelangelo. Barely a flicker of the light from the lamp made its way to this section of the building, so it was dark.

It was really, really, very dark.

It was darker than it should be.

The tiny bit of light from the outer room that had been faintly reflected in the tiles was gone. I couldn’t even sense the closeness of the walls. Worse, it was hot. Even though I was in the middle of the jungle, throughout the ceremony I’d been surprised by how comfortable it had been, even cold at times. But now I was covered with an absolutely oppressive heat, a thick, unbreathable mass. I could still hear people talking, and somewhere inside I thought, I’ve gone blind. Somewhere else inside I thought that would almost be a relief. I couldn’t make my arms move to try and feel for the walls. Some sort of saline dam had opened its locks and sweat was pouring down my face. The walls were gone and I was in a pitch black nothing. A void. This wasn’t blindness. I was in hell. I was in hell and there was no song, no one was singing any more and there was no way to find a path back.

I sat there, too terrified to move, for hours. Hours that were really only a few minutes. I can’t remember how I broke the spell of the moment, I just remember that somehow I saw light again, the tiniest amount, and managed to prod my neurons just enough to start moving, to finally stand back up. I shuffled my way back to my spot on the floor.

The moment was completely gone now, like I’d been misdiagnosed with minutes to live. Oh, sorry, never mind that bit, you’re fine. I was shaken and confused, still covered with sweat and newly freezing. And still nauseous. Sarah lay next to me on her mat, still well under the influence, too, and we stayed in the ceremony building, along with a number of other people, until dawn. When the sun started to come up we decided to risk standing up again and trying to walk back to our bungalow. There I slept, if it can be called that, fitfully for about two hours before I woke to the sound of a large drum being beaten in the distance. It was time for breakfast.

Before breakfast we were offered the opportunity to help prepare the ayahuasca we’d be using the next two nights. This would be a really good moment for me to describe the process and how helping to ready the ingredients for their day-long brewing was a way in which to further connect with the spirits that we were interacting with. But I hadn’t had any real sleep in days, hadn’t eaten since noon the previous day, my back was hurting down into my leg and I was still a little nauseous, so all I can really say is I sat where they pointed and pounded ayahuasca vine with a heavy mallet for twenty minutes or so. I ate breakfast. I slept. I ate lunch.

After lunch we went back to the open shed where the ayahuasca continued to steep in a series of large pots. Don Alberto, with the help of a translator, was answering questions. As we sat there it started to rain, a heavy rain that still managed to be peaceful. A girl from South Africa talked obliquely about her experience the night before and wondered if, since it had gone so well, she needed to participate in another ceremony. As he listened through the translator, Don Alberto smiled, the kind of amused smile that only comes from having heard a question more times than you can count. Yes, he replied, there is more to learn.

I went to our room to lay back down and think about what I was going to do that night. After the first ceremony we had the option to not participate in the others. I’d had a really amazing experience the night before and was glad I’d done it. But it hadn’t felt life-changing. It had been more like an extremely strong LSD trip; the hallucinations, the distortion of time, it all had that same feeling, though with a bit more direction to it, maybe. I’d also had enough time for the jaded, cynical part of me to start working over the doubts. There was a back door to the kitchen with a light over the outside, just across from the ceremony hut, and it didn’t take much imagination to see how my DMT-affected brain could have turned that into a face. They were just hallucinations from a strong chemical, mixed with an exotic location, an unfamiliar culture, a lack of sleep and a neurotic brain that was never very good at dealing with most of those. The result was interesting to say the least, even fun, but I wasn’t sure it was worth feeling nauseous and debilitated.

I debated and slept, I walked to the common area and talked with a couple of people and the remaining hours passed more quickly than I would have thought. By the time we were back in the ceremony hut, as the sun began to set, I remained unsure of whether I was going to participate, right up until I took the cup from Hamilton’s hands and drank it.

Next: I sit here and try and think of some way to describe the second night, and we all see if I succeed.

Also, you can see photos on my Tumblr account >>

I rinsed my mouth out with a little of the water from my cup and spit it into the pan that I assumed I would become intimately familiar with soon. Once the last person received their dose, the sole kerosene lamp lighting the room was doused, revealing it was now night outside. The room was silent as Don Alberto began to softly shake the chacapa, a sort of traditional rattle of dried leaves, and sing in both Spanish and Quechua. Not that I knew the difference or was able to understand either, but it didn’t matter. Soon both Hamilton and Malcolm joined in the singing as well, though it still remained quiet enough to hear how much noise continued outside in the jungle. The room was nearly pitch black, though I knew that would change as the drug kicked in and my eyes became extra sensitive to light. I lay back on the mat and waited.

When I made the decision that I was going to go to Peru, I had tried to avoid reading too much about the experiences of others. I knew a little already about DMT (the active ingredient of the ayahuasca mixture, it’s been a while since I said that), that it was a lot like LSD in many respects, but more potent and less time consuming. One of my main complaints about LSD was that it was amazing for a few hours and then it was another four hours or so of sitting around and thinking, “Okay, enough already.” But something even more intriguing about DMT to me was that so many people described very similar visions. The cynical part of me, of course, just assumed that was an effect of people reading about other experiences and their subconscious seizing on that. So I decided I’d try to go into it with as uncolored a view of it as I could.

Still, I did have the knowledge of what I’d read initially that had encouraged me to try ayahuasca myself, so I thought I had at least a vague idea of what it would be like. The National Geographic article in particular had described the experience as both wonderful and terrifying, and in particular had described the purging aspect of it as not just physical but spiritual, as ribbons of dark, evil energy were being pulled from her being. I may not have been sure of the reality of her experience but I trusted in the import of it, at a minimum. This was work, with dark, emotional stuff. Worse, I knew I was going in with a depression that revolved around an extremely strong self-hatred, one I definitely felt I had earned. So I felt like I had valid reasons for thinking this could be, at least initially, a horrible ordeal.

I tried to think about some of the things we’d been told in preparation for the ceremony. The main one was to go into it with an intent; something you wanted to achieve, a question, a concern or a concept; and focus on it as you entered the mareación, as this would help to direct your journey somewhat. If things got rough it helped to listen for the icaros as it was also there to help direct the ceremony, as well as offer protection. We had actually been cautioned against trying to help others who seemed to be struggling, that a shaman or apprentice would come and assist. It was important that we gave everyone in the room the space to have their own experience, including ourselves. In general for me this meant trying not to interact with Sarah, and vice versa, which we did a fairly good job of, overall. Still, it was her voice that was my first inkling that things were about to happen.

“Paul, do you see all those people walking around outside with green flashlights?”

I lifted my head and watched through the screen for a minute. Finally, I lay back, “There’s no one outside.”

“Oh.”

I was so amused that it didn’t register that I was able to see clearly in the darkness now.

I don’t know exactly when I realized the aya was in control. Sarah says at some point I told her I was beginning to see things in the ceiling; movement and colors; but I don’t remember that. I think I felt the nausea before anything else. The voices of the shamans were louder now, their icaros calling in the plant spirits from the jungle. Around me, some people were already beginning to purge and the sound had a strange lilt to it, as if it were slowly building in time with the music. I turned my head and looked back out the screened window where a face was staring back at me. Except it wasn’t exactly a face so much as it was as if a collection of wide neon strips, glowing bright white, had decided to get together and approximate a face. I tried to make sense of it, even as the face continued to float there, tried to find the trick that was being played, some guy in a mask, maybe, this is all just part of a show they put on. But the music was growing louder and the same thought kept coming back to me, over and over: They’re here. They’re ready to come inside now.

My memory of the rest of the ceremony itself is a jumble. At some point my body told me it was time to purge. I sat up and experienced two of the most perfunctory bouts of vomiting I’ve ever had. One. Two. I paused and waited but my body told me that was it, lay back down. I hadn’t really tried to focus on any kind of “intent,” just a mind as open as I could make it and a request that whatever this was would show me whatever it was it had to show me. With closed eyes I saw swirls of color and geometric shapes, alternating with visions of vaguely Hindu design. Out in the dark jungle, a nocturnal bird called over and over. Its voice sounded exactly like a warm, affectionate but mocking laugh. The singing of the shamans would swell, the timbre of their voices rising while the sound of purging around the room matched it in volume, and then ebb until Don Alberto’s soft whistling would seem to blow in to cover the room in a blanket, like a breeze filled with the scent of something familiar. We would seem to hover there, thirty or so people, seemingly connected, catching their breath at once, before we plunged back in and it all started again.

The thing is… we were all connected. At least, it seemed that way to me. Lying there, my guts and my brain carrying on what seemed like an endless debate about just how imperative it was that I get up and go to the bathroom, I felt linked to everyone else’s distress. It was as if the purging was something coherent that was moving throughout the room, and if I focused on it I could take it into myself. I would feel my own nausea rise and the room’s emotional cloud would seem lessened. At other times the feeling would be too much and I would be on the verge of finally trying to stand and somehow stumble towards a toilet, when suddenly I would hear the sound of someone else expelling god knows what and the feeling would pass.

Look, I’m not trying to work my way through the thesaurus listing for “purge,” and it’s not like the ceremony was exclusively about vomiting and shitting. But there were more than thirty people in the room and we all had some kind of physical exorcism (made that one up myself, Merriam-Webster, so screw you) at least twice, so the sound was pretty common and there’s no sense pretending otherwise. But it also didn’t quite register as what it was. It was just a sound, representing something, in a room full of sounds. Occasionally, things would go quiet, the songs would pause, and Hamilton would offer encouragement. “You guys are doing great, you guys are my rockstars.” “Just a little ayahuasca. Be glad it’s not a little more.” I lay on my mat, deep in the ebb and flow of the room, feeling as psychedelic as is humanly possible. My body felt as if it were no longer hampered by petty concerns like musculature or physics. I would start to yawn and the sensation would work its way from my chest to my head, twisting my anatomy like a whip in slow motion, until appearing from my mouth, a sigh inside a word balloon, both of us adorned with colorful curls and spirals as if we’d been drawn by Brendan McCarthy.

And then, it was over. The lamp was re-lit, Don Alberto left the building to a scattering of “Gracias, Maestro,” and people began to slowly move about. Those who’d done this before talked quietly and compared thoughts; the first-timers looked about, blinking, trying to process. In the flickering glow of kerosene, reality seemed to creep its way warily back inside.

Except.

Except I was still laying there. I was still in the mareación.

Next: Seriously this time, I have a literal dark night of the soul in the bathroom.

The Susi French Connection, a super-fine band doing covers of the finest (and/or worst) of seventies AM Gold hits, will be playing at Eddie’s Attic (Atlanta, GA) in November, and are kindly allowing me to hop up and sing a song once again. I know what it is and it will be awesome.

You may or may not know that back in December I took a trip to Peru to participate in a few ayahuasca ceremonies. If you’re curious about how that went, or even what the hell an ayahuasca ceremony is, I’ve been updating the Blog (finally) with all the details.

Also, you can see photos on my Tumblr account >>

So, I feel like it would be fair to say up front that there’s an awful lot about the ceremonies I don’t remember.

I’ll wait in case anyone wants to storm off at this point.

Okay.

It’s not that I blacked out or anything, but what comes to you in those few hours is really an overload of… information? Images? Emotions? Yes. All of those. I took a notebook with me to try and write while I was in Peru, but by the time I was there my emotional state was so bad and then the experiences themselves so draining that I never wrote anything. And like a really powerful dream the further you get from it, the less you can recall most of the surrounding detail, and just the big images stick out. It becomes, like everything, a memory of a memory.

More importantly, I’m not entirely sure how to describe a good portion of what happened. I’m actually just sort of writing as I go and hoping by the time I get there I’ll be able to get something intelligible out. The funny aspect of how I’ve been handling trying to describe all of this is really kind of immersing myself in every bit of it that I’m able, to try and recreate as much of that mindset as I can. On my computer screen as I write I have Sarah’s posts that she had written shortly after the trip, along with an excellent piece written by a friend we made while in Peru (who was also there for the first time) and my fairly voluminous Flickr set from the trip. As I write I stop to reread a lot of what they wrote as well as re-researching a lot of things, all in an effort to feel connected to the whole affair rather than just describing it dispassionately from a distance. If only because I don’t think that kind of ‘view from above’ would help me convey it in any way. My point is, wish me luck.

As I said, the ceremony building (“building” describing a structure that seems too large to actually apply, but “hut” being similarly too small-sounding) was a large screened-in circular affair with a conical roof. Inside there was no central support pillar, instead the thatch roof was held up by criss-crossing beams. During the day, Mayan-style hammocks hung from the main horizontal beams but for the ceremonies these were wrapped up out of the way. The bathrooms (we made sure to note) were hidden behind a half wall in the back. Most of the rest of the floor was taken up with with sleeping mats, each of which came with a pillow, a blanket, a metal cup of water, a hospital pan and a roll of toilet paper. Around the outer ring of the room were fifteen or so lounge chairs, in the middle of which were three large office chairs and a small rug. On the rug was an enormous collection of various religious idols, Buddhas, crystals, marble spheres, a Lucky Cat or two and even a small statue of Yoda.

I know, and I’ll explain.

Part of what Hamilton is trying to teach at Blue Morpho is what he calls “Universal Philosophy.”

“It states that each human being IS the infinite universe, the one universe and each individual universe is the same, whole. In universality we are the same. You already know everything. You are already whole. You are already enlightened. You just have not thought it or experienced it yet.”
- Hamilton Souther

He makes himself available at times during the day to talk about his beliefs and some of the return visitors seem to follow these talks closely. But while in many ways it’s central to how he leads the ceremonies, it’s not an aspect he tries to push on visitors. As such, I’m not really going to get into it here since it wasn’t my focus. However, one aspect of the philosophy is the idea that all religions and cultural ideas are valid that are based on Love, and you can worship or focus on any belief that works for you, because in the end they’re all the same, hence the collection sitting on the rug.

The lounge chairs were meant for return visitors and the mats for newbies, since ayahuasca has such a strong effect they feel it’s safer if the first-timers are already on the ground, so we chose our spots. Slowly the rest of the group trickled in and the same nervous energy that seemed to infuse everything so far began to build a little higher. We’d already learned what the extra items were for… The blanket for the sudden extremes in temperature we might feel during the ceremony. The metal cup with a small amount of water was there to rinse out your mouth, if needed, but not to drink. The round hospital pan and the toilet paper were there for more or less the same reason: an inevitable part of the process called the “purge” which is exactly what it sounds like. How it decides to vacate your body depends on the individual, and some will be able to calmly be assisted to the bathrooms, while others might have a more misplaced faith in the efficacy of their digestive systems. Around us would be several native helpers with dim red lights in their hands, ready to assist anyone’s plaintive cry, “Baño… Baño, por favor…”

Through the screens I could see dusk was settling outside. Finally, Hamilton entered, followed by the shaman who had trained him, an older, smaller Quechua Indian called Don Alberto. For every bit of California charm that Hamilton exuded, it was surpassed by his mentor’s aura of vitality and wisdom. You knew he knew things, things you could never understand, or at least that’s how it seemed to me. They sat in the two largest chairs on either side of the small rug and pulled out two large bottles containing a viscous brown sludge, the ayahuasca, and set them upon the floor. Hamilton spoke briefly about the ceremony as the light outside continued to dim.

He and Don Alberto lit their mapachos, cigarettes made from an extremely potent South American tobacco, and began blowing the smoke over themselves as a means of cleansing before doing the same with both bottles. Mixed in with the smoke were the first stirrings of the icaros, the medicine songs sung by the shamans in order to call forth the plant spirits, to clear the room of dark energy and to bring on the mareación, the actual visionary journey we were all there for. The icaros at this point were not much more than a soft, whispery whistle, blown into the bottle of ayahuasca, and in the expectant silence of the room it was a compelling and soothing sound. Each shaman had a small tin cup he filled with the thick liquid and began the same process of blowing tobacco smoke and whistling into the cup before eventually drinking. Hamilton joked that Don Alberto had taken a “jungle dose,” a nearly full cup.

One by one, the process was repeated as each person in the outer ring of seats came and sat in front of one of the shamans to receive their dose. The maestro, a word they were using interchangeably with shaman, would pour an amount either requested by or which they felt sufficient for the person, blow mapacho smoke into the cup and whistle a soft icaros intended for that individual. The woman from the bus with the friendly face was one of the first to drink and as she received the cup she held it aloft and toasted, “Salut!” All of us responded.

Watching was like sitting in a roller coaster just as it leaves the station, and as each person toasted “Salut!” and drank you saw their car latch onto the chain taking them up the first big drop. Eventually, everyone on the outer ring was done and it was time for the first-timers on the mats to begin. Because of where I was sitting, that meant me. I went up and knelt in front of Hamilton as he poured about a quarter of the way up the tin cup, the amount he recommended for those who’d never tried it before. He blew the smoke and whistled and I closed my eyes and tried to sink myself into the moment, which was pretty impossible given the amount of expectation I felt. I accepted the cup and held it momentarily, looking down into the deep brown liquid, the acrid smell hitting my nostrils for the first time. Drink it or you never will, you idiot! I toasted the room and downed the cup, and a taste somewhere between bitter chocolate, dirt and battery acid went speeding down my throat.

I went and sat back down on my mat. My car had latched onto the chain and I waited for the floor to drop out from under me.

Next: Next, I experience something amazing and have a literal dark night of the soul in the bathroom.