Read the previous 7 parts >>
See supplemental stuff I’m posting on Tumblr as I write >>

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.

Previously:
Part 1, in which I give more background info than you want, and decide to go to Peru. >>
Part 2, in which I finally get to Lima and am a crybaby. >>
Part 3, in which I arrive in Iquitos in a dreamlike state. >>
Part 4, in which we journey into the jungle and I am afraid of water. >>
Part 5, in which I take forever to finally describe drinking ayahuasca. >>
Part 6, in which, yes, I am finally drugged. >>

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.

Previously:
Part 1, in which I give more background info than you want, and decide to go to Peru. >>
Part 2, in which I finally get to Lima and am a crybaby. >>
Part 3, in which I arrive in Iquitos in a dreamlike state. >>
Part 4, in which we journey into the jungle and I am afraid of water. >>
Part 5, in which I take forever to finally describe drinking ayahuasca. >>

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.

Previously:
Part 1, in which I give more background info than you want, and decide to go to Peru. >>
Part 2, in which I finally get to Lima and am a crybaby. >>
Part 3, in which I arrive in Iquitos in a dreamlike state. >>
Part 4, in which we journey into the jungle and I am afraid of water. >>

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.

Previously:
Part 1, in which I give more background info than you want, and decide to go to Peru. >>
Part 2, in which I finally get to Lima and am a crybaby. >>
Part 3, in which I arrive in Iquitos in a dreamlike state. >>

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

We woke early the next day. Outside the window various divisions of the Peruvian military marched around the square and performed a flag-raising ceremony and I watched for a bit before getting my things together. When I was in high school I had discovered Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares so I had a weird sort of quasi-romantic image of… well, Argentina, really, but South America in general. Looking out at the skyline of the square as the troops moved in formation I felt nostalgia for something I really had no experience with, something that was about as real a memory as a Francesca Fiore/Bruno Puntz Jones sketch, but still, there it was. I suppose being in a perpetual state of semi-sleep-deprivation will do that to you.

We left the hotel and found a mototaxi to take us to the Blue Morpho office. Twenty minutes of spinal-adjustments and hanging on to our bags on the luggage rack through the back of the canopy later we arrived. The office really wasn’t much more than an open-air garage space holding two of the ubiquitous wooden buses and a separate room full of chairs and couches that currently held about thirty people. I sat on one of the couches while Sarah chatted with some of the others. I couldn’t really sort out whatever it was I was feeling… apprehension, impatience, a soul-crushing existential weariness? It was something in-between those. The room was friendly but guarded since everyone had their own personal reasons for being there, after all, though there was a certain survivors’ camaraderie you could sense between the repeat visitors. Eventually, forms filled out and money exchanged, we all clambered onto one of the two buses for the hour and a half drive into the jungle.

The woman sitting in front of me had the kind of face that said she’d chosen at some point to love people by default, and I realized I had known people like that before and for some reason always been wary of them. She turned around early in the ride and asked me where I was from and if I’d done this before. I answered and her face lit up, she’d come from Colorado but had lived briefly in Atlanta, so I answered a few questions about the city. She explained she was a frequent visitor to Blue Morpho but that this was her first time back in a few years, and then she lightly broached the subject of why I’d come. I gave her my ultra-slim “extreme depression” answer and she seemed genuinely excited for me to experience my first ceremony.

As we hit the edges of Iquitos our bus pulled off to the side of the road. The driver pulled out a wrench and I wondered if my daydream of being stranded and driving a mototaxi for the rest of my life was about to come true. Another man hopped on board with a large container of gasoline, though, and we were quickly moving again. It was a lonely road bordered by jungle and the occasional thatched roof. The air felt light and different and every now and again rain would fall into the windowless bus. My mood was no better but I understood, even so, that this was something new. I looked around at the others, the ones engaged in quiet, extended conversations and the ones who, like me, either stared out the window or occasionally glanced about. From behind me a guy leaned forward and made a quick remark, I laughed softly in response. Friendly, but guarded. I realized how badly those of us who’d never done this before stood out.

Finally, we turned left off the Iquitos-Nauta road onto a sloping dirt road, past a small lake and into the trees before coming to a stop on a concrete platform. In front of us was a small collection of thatched-roof bungalows tightly surrounded by the jungle forest and we were directed towards the largest and closest of them. Inside, an Australian named Malcolm gave us an overview of the rules and the upcoming schedule and let us know that lunch would be served soon. It was nearly noon and it would be our last meal until breakfast the next morning. Sarah and I went to our room, a small space divided off from a larger bungalow, with some shelves, a small table, and two single-sized mats inside a mosquito net tent. Tellingly, there were two round hospital pans next to the mats. The bungalow itself held three other rooms like this, as well as a sink and mirror, a shower and a toilet. We unpacked and headed back to the main building to eat.

Lunch was plain chicken with pasta, flavored with a mild spice that seemed to be in every single meal I had while I was in Peru. Still, it was more flavorful than I expected with the dietary restrictions we were under. Afterwards, Hamilton, a tall, blond, ex-Californian who was the owner of Blue Morpho and one of the two shamans who’d be presiding over the three ceremonies we’d be taking in total, came in. He settled into one of the lounge chairs and explained what we could expect over the next three days and answered some questions before eventually holding court with a smaller group of people who seemed to clearly be regular visitors. That left the newer among us to get back to the important work of nervously looking at each other without looking too hard, and asking questions that didn’t probe too deeply.

Sarah and I decided to head back up the dirt road to the small lake we passed, a spring-fed body of water that we’d been told was safe to swim in. Before we got there a small, skinny black and white dog came hopping towards us. There seemed to be dogs running loose everywhere in Peru so it was no shock to see one now, but she reminded me of my own dog at home. Worse, she made a pitiful sight in the heat, panting hard and her rips showing through her narrow chest. Sarah remembered a packet of beef jerky in her bag from the flight (and we weren’t going to be allowed to eat it for at least a week) so we sat for a little while and fed her before continuing on to the lake.

Ever since I was young I’ve had a weird aversion to swimming in anything other than artificial pools, from some combination of living creatures darting between my legs, the sensation of my feet sinking into mud (or not finding the bottom at all) and the fact that I nearly drowned in the ocean once. Deep down I think the thing that disturbs me the most is not being able to see below the surface of the water. So, while Sarah wasted no time getting in I just sat at the edge of the covered dock and dangled my feet.

The first ceremony would be taking place at 6pm inside, appropriately, the ceremony building, a large circular affair with a conical roof. It had been suggested that we make ourselves familiar with the layout, in particular how to get to the bathrooms available in the back, before the ceremony began since we’d be in no shape at that point to figure that sort of thing out. So after drying ourselves off in our room we made our way towards the ceremony building… AND DESTINY!

Too much?

Next: Finally, the first ceremony.

Previously:
Part 1, in which I give more background info than you want, and decide to go to Peru. >>
Part 2, in which I finally get to Lima and am a crybaby. >>

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

One extra drug of note I should have mentioned before: about two years ago I started having serious trouble falling asleep. I’d had the occasional bout of insomnia before, but this was different. It felt like I had forgotten HOW to fall asleep. I would lie in bed and wait to fall asleep, as if it were a state of mind I could recognize with clarity, as if the mere act of thinking now I am falling asleep did not in fact mean I was now wide awake again. As the night would wear on I would feel more and more unhinged until I would give up and get out of bed, and sunrises began to feel like the worst thing I had ever seen. Eventually I started taking Ambien, which worked wonders, but I had to take it every single night. By the time we were going to Peru I had been taking it every night for close to two years and I couldn’t sleep without it. Unfortunately, it was another drug that had to be purged from my system before I could take ayahuasca, though since it had a short half-life I didn’t have to quit taking it until the day we left.

I woke the next morning in the hotel after three hours sleep and we caught a taxi back to the airport as the sun was just edging over the horizon. I hadn’t slept very deeply and I was drained from my little emotional breakdown, too, and it left me in a weird state of disorientation that would become almost a default for me until well after we were back home. In that daze we made it to the airport and our flight from Lima to Iquitos, in the Peruvian rainforest.

Iquitos is not a small town, in fact it has a population of close to 400,000. Nevertheless, it is the world’s largest city that is inaccessible by road. If you want to get to Iquitos you either arrive by air or by water. Or you could walk, too, I suppose, but I wouldn’t recommend it, really. Actually, all that’s kind of a lie, as it used to be the largest city inaccessible by road, but they recently completed a road to the small town of Nauta, 100km to the south. But as Nauta itself has no major roads leading out of it other than the one that now leads to Iquitos, let’s just call it even. Flying into the airport provides a small adventure of its own, as you slowly descend over miles of jungle forest, and hey, there’s the Amazon, some other small rivers, small villages, boy we’re getting low, some small huts with backyards, some weeds, wow we’re really low HEY THE RUNWAY! Where the hell did that come from?

We came to a stop, the doors opened and we disembarked the way god intended, directly onto the tarmac. The airport in front of us, “Coronel FAP Francisco Secada Vignetta” written above the doorways, was about the size of a large grocery store in America. For the first time I processed in concrete terms that I was deep in South America, unmoored. I turned back to snap a couple of photos of the plane and the passengers unloading and watched as several fans were having their pictures taken with a university futbol team that had been on the flight. I smiled and somehow felt reassured.

Inside the terminal we found a representative from Blue Morpho, the company that ran the center we’d be heading to the next day. He greeted us and said he was waiting for a few more arrivals. This kind of “adventure tourism” is big business for Iquitos, and Blue Morpho is only one group of many in the area offering what it does. I watched the rest of the crowd from the plane filter inside and wondered how many of the other gringos would end up with us. In the end a group of about fifteen gathered together and eventually caught the two small shuttle buses to our respective hotels. Driving into town we passed few actual cars, instead we were swarmed on all sides by buses, seemingly made made mostly of wood, and mototaxis, motorcycles that had been modified with a cabin on the back supported by two wheels. Somewhere in my mind I thought, if somehow we end up trapped here, I’ll drive a mototaxi for a living. It didn’t sound so bad.

The hotel we were staying in was across from the Plaza de Armas, the main square of Iquitos. We didn’t know it yet, but the square was really the social center of the city. For now it was just a few vendors hawking jewelry, toys, framed insects and copyright infringing balloons and balls. After checking in we walked out into the square and were swarmed by young men, Blue Morpho? You Blue Morpho? We were so easily spotted. For us they had maps of the Amazon and bracelets containing a crosscut of ayahuasca vine. We tried as politely as we could to shoulder past, but the friendliest of the lot followed along and unofficially appointed himself our tour guide. We walked down the street to the river Itaya, where signs for a company called Anaconda offered boat rides into the jungle proper as well as access to ayahuasca shamans. We tried to pause and take it in while our guide continued to suggest various things we could pay him for. But sleeping in last night’s bed had left me with a sharp lower back stab and it was getting worse as we walked, so we said our polite but slightly firmer goodbyes and went back to the hotel. I tried to read… an odd book I’d found months previous about a former writer for Superman who met a man who claimed he had been created solely from another man’s imagination, but my mental state was up and down and I couldn’t focus.

Eventually we attempted another foray out into the streets for dinner. In the square things were picking up, and we stopped at a sidewalk restaurant called “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” Apparently owned by a Texas expatriate, it was decorated in the colors of the Texas Longhorns, featured tabletops painted in the style of tacky tourist postcards and, most importantly, offered food that was allowed in an ayahuasca diet. We had both been on a fairly restrictive pre-ceremony diet for a week, and now that we had arrived it became especially limited. I ate plain chicken with plain rice and a slice of pineapple and we headed back to the square where two different military marching bands were trading off songs. We wandered through the large crowd that had gathered to listen as children played with glowing spinning discs and a five-foot-tall man in his homemade Predator costume walked aimlessly around.

According to the hotel desk it was a typical night in the square. Back in our room we tried to rest and my mood collapsed again. Eventually I fell asleep, watching the fireworks shooting off in the Plaza de Armas.

Next: I know, I know, we’re up to part 4 now and I haven’t even gotten to the damn drugs. We’re nearly there, I promise.

Previously:
Part 1, in which I give more background info than you want, and decide to go to Peru. >>

I’ve never been a particularly spiritual person. I’ve never been rooted in any particular faith since my early childhood. I had even come to realize that I had little faith in pretty much anything, in the strictest sense of the word. Lengthy depression had left me jaded; I had grown incapable of believing in things based solely on belief. But that same lengthy depression had also left me so tired and worn-down that I was willing to try anything. It was a weird place to be.

On top of that, one of the first requirements of the ayahuasca ceremonies is that my system needed to be clear of any other drugs, and that included the Wellbutrin and Zoloft I was taking at the time. The combination hadn’t been doing me a whole lot of good, my general emotional state was ‘completely disinterested in life.’ Still, that was a lot better than ‘wanting to exit life’ so I wasn’t exactly comfortable with the idea of going off them. But if I was going to go through with the ceremonies I had no choice, there was a genuine risk to my life if I tried to mix them with the ayahuasca. Three months before the trip I started the slow process of weaning off what I’d been taking, so that six weeks before the ceremony my system would be clear. It was a lousy process and worse once the drugs were gone. By that time I had pretty much severed contact with the outside world and I tried to simply hold on to the idea that what I was doing served some kind of purpose, that as bad as I felt at least this time it was some kind of step towards feeling better.

Sarah and I left for Peru in early December. It’s a six hour flight from Atlanta to Lima that takes you from the Atlantic coast of the US to the Pacific coast of South America, without ever leaving the Eastern Time Zone. It doesn’t seem like that should be right, but trust me, it is. We played trivia on the seat-back video system and I got a question about Mike Viola (who I opened for in Boston a while ago), of all things, and I tried to watch movies and tv shows I don’t actually like. In other words, it’s a long, boring flight especially if you hate flying, and I do, and especially if you’re flying at night, which we were.

We got into Lima at midnight, shambled through customs and out in to the night, taking a taxi to a hotel for literally just the night. It was eight hours until our flight to Iquitos and we’d decided we didn’t want to try and sleep in the empty airport. Both of us had tried to pick up enough Spanish as we could beforehand but, like everyone always says, the gap between studying a language and actually trying to practice it in conversation with native speakers is pretty wide. It made for a surreal experience to start the trip. Our amiable driver spoke better English than we did Spanish (Un poco. Mi Espanol es muy terrible was one of the first phrases I became fluent with), and was happy to practice it with us, so we had a lengthy, halting, multi-lingual conversation about the population of Lima versus Atlanta and why Chinese food is so popular in Peru. We drove along barren-seeming beaches in the dark and through cramped but empty streets that nevertheless included a fire-juggler looking for tips, until we reached the hotel. It was similarly cramped, in a way that suggested it was never built to be a hotel, with a tiny, glass elevator (with a swinging door), paper-thin walls and windows that faced the hallways.

I tried to sleep, but weighed down by the drunken voices reverberating through the building, the six hours in an airplane seat, the three months without meds, the knowledge that I was in a place where I could barely communicate with those around me and the general feeling of having untethered myself from any feeling of security I’d ever had, what little emotional scaffolding I had finally collapsed. Sarah tried to calm me as best she could, as tired and stretched thin as she felt herself, and eventually I fell asleep listening quietly to an old episode of This American Life and hanging my temporary sanity on the solidity of familiar sound.

Next time: Things pick up, I swear.

Everyone wants to know “what happened in Peru?”

Or, more accurately, they wanted to know, back in December when I had just returned. Unfortunately, I turned out to be incapable of writing about it at the time. In fact, it’s only recently that I’ve started to feel as if I have any kind of handle on what happened. So, for the next few days I’m going to try and get back to that particular mindset as best I can and put something together in some reasonable fashion. I may digress and discuss other things that might seem unconnected that will hopefully become more clear as this goes on, though it’s entirely possible they won’t. This might end up being terribly long (in return for which I’ll break it into more manageable bits), though again it’s also possible I might get two paragraphs in and find I have nowhere to go. In which case, well, that’s already one paragraph gone right there.

The short version is that Peru was amazing. Life-changing. But it’s all still up for grabs as to what it’s changing into.

First, the context: When I was younger, I smoked pot infrequently and usually to little effect. I never developed any kind of taste for alcohol. On the rare occasions I drank I did it at parties in order to get drunk, and since I grew up shy and introverted I didn’t go to a lot of parties. I also did LSD four times, the most recent being roughly twenty years ago. That’s pretty much a full accounting of the illicit substances I’ve ingested in my life. Of those, only LSD made any kind of impact on my worldview. It didn’t shatter worlds, but it did make their foundations shaky. I knew after the first time I tried it that I had become a different person, or at least now saw the world in a different way. I still think that everyone should try it at least once, I mean, accept or reject what it shows you, but at least look. But, hey, that’s me, and anyway that isn’t the point of writing this.

No, the point is that I’ve tried illegal drugs, found worth in some, less in others. None of them developed into anything anyone could reasonably call a ‘habit.’

More context: I’ve seen various doctors, psychiatrists and therapists to help deal with the severe depression I’ve battled over the past fifteen years or so. This depression, it seems to me, is largely situational and self-inflicted. It stems from certain behaviors and choices and their accompanying guilt and regret, and was exacerbated by a powerful ability to look the other way and convince myself that the cause and effect were unrelated. The particulars are important personally, but they don’t have anything to do with the point of writing this.

No, the point is I’ve also tried a good number of legal drugs, found worth in some, less in others. Certainly, the amount of Prozac, Wellbutrin, Celexa, Effexor, etc. that has been pumped into my system over the last fifteen years is far in excess of the more illegal psychoactive drugs I experimented with in my early twenties. None of them provided any positive results that anyone could reasonably call ‘permanent.’

So, that’s the landscape that more or less existed last November when I wrote that I was going to Peru to take ayahuasca. At the time I didn’t bother to explain what ayahuasca was because, you know, I assume everyone knows everything I do. “Ayahuasca” is a psychoactive brew made from the ayahuasca vine and chacruna leaves, that’s been used by indigenous Amazonian cultures as a religious sacrament and healing medicine for thousands of years.

“Chacruna leaves contain DMT, a powerful hallucinogen that’s orally inactive. But it’s dissolved in the stomach [by] monoamine oxydase. They mix chacruna leaves with ayahuasca, which contains several substances that inhibit the stomach enzyme. By cooking the two plants together for hours, it produces a drink that contains orally active DMT and the molecule is absorbed through the stomach intact and goes to the brain. How could they have discovered this recipe when we know there are 80,000 species of evolved plants in the Amazon? Any given combination would give only a one in six billion chance of finding it.”
- Jeremy Narby, anthropologist

DMT also happens to be a Schedule I drug, which creates the odd situation in the US where it would be legal to grow ayahuasca and chacruna but illegal to mix and ingest them.

My first serious exposure to the drug was stumbling onto an article in National Geographic, by a writer who suffered from meds-resistant depression, who had read some of the scientific studies involving the use of psychedelics in treating depression (ayahuasca in particular), and decided to travel to Peru to participate in an ayahuasca ceremony. Her experiences (the article was written during a return visit) struck a chord with me and, when eventually my own situation deteriorated to the point where electro-convulsive therapy was being suggested, I decided I had nothing to lose in trying something seemingly crazy.

(As I’m posting these, I’ll be updating my Tumblr feed with photos. If you’re a completist, head on over!)