by alex seymour
At least she was breathing; we knew that much. After nearly half an hour of massaging her back and Humberto singing to her and encouraging her return, Humberto announced that she was going to be fine. We should now let her sleep. We laid her down carefully on the mattress and went back to our own spots in the semicircle around Humberto’s chair. He resumed his singing for the group. Every ten minutes or so, we took turns checking on Miley. She was breathing steadily, and if we shook her, she groaned quietly. Thank God.
With Miley taken care of, Humberto was soon asleep in his rocking chair. Richard wandered off to go and sleep in his bed, leaving just Reuben and me. We chatted quietly, and as we did, Miley awakened and unsteadily rose from the mattress. She tried to walk toward the toilets but was wobbly and in danger of falling. I rushed over to steady her, and as she put her weight on me, I nearly toppled over, unsteady from the lingering effects of the ayahuasca. Propping her up from beneath her armpits, I practically dragged her to the toilet. She tried to say something but could barely talk. When we got there I made sure she had a torch and knew where the toilet paper was, then pulled the curtain and went back across the room to the mattress, lay down, and fell asleep.
Waking up four hours later, the light of the Amazon dawn flooded in through the gauze of the wraparound window. A quick glance at the mattress to my left revealed that Miley was missing. I stumbled groggily to the toilets and found her in the same cubicle where she’d been left hours before. She was lying on the cold tile floor huddled in a fetal position, fast asleep, surrounded by vomit. I cleaned up the mess and shook her awake as gently as I could.
“Miley, you’ve fallen asleep in the toilet.”
She mumbled something unintelligible and laughed, embarrassed. Jesus Christ, this has really knocked her out. There was a strong likelihood that this was the most undignified and out of it she’d ever been in her life. Certainly, from the conversations we’d had, I knew she led a conservative lifestyle, and this current state was way beyond her realm of experience.
I got her back to her room and in bed, returned to my room, and lay down for some proper shut-eye. I could still feel the visionary plant medicine coursing in my system, and the feeling was now calm serenity.
I hoped the next ceremony would go a little easier on all of us.
13
Jungle Wonder
T he next day Richard, Humberto, Reuben, and I sat talking over breakfast. Humberto suspected, as did Richard, that a dark energy had entered Miley and lodged deep within her to bring on the catatonic episode. Richard euphemistically called it a “funky energy.”
Whatever the cause, Humberto was confident that whatever the dark energy or disembodied entity was that had invaded her, he could remove it completely given a couple of weeks of ceremonies and concerted shamanic healing effort. It was obvious to Humberto that this energy was more than just funky. I felt almost certain that in his private conversations with Richard, which I had overheard, Humberto had used the word demonio, Spanish for demon.
Reuben seemed to fall asleep between mouthfuls during lunch, his head bobbing comically up and down. We all wanted to know if Miley had any recollection of her catatonic experience. Not surprisingly, what little she remembered was hazy. She had heard us calling her name and was aware of us trying to wake her up. She thought that she had responded; while we had been near panic, she had felt fine and calm. This was good news, and we didn’t go into any more detail of our experience of the previous night. With plenty more ceremonies to participate in, no one wanted to antagonize anything that had been stirred up in her.
Later that afternoon Miley and I got to know each other better. I showed her a downloaded YouTube clip called Double Rainbow, a popular meme watched more than forty-two million times. It shows a man in America and the double rainbow that appeared over his front yard. He freaks out in humbled awe, equally touching and hilarious.
I left the room to wander around the perimeter of the encampment, peering into the vegetation as the evening drew in. The jungle—the polar opposite of civilized, like a mystical sage who didn’t care what the hell ordinary folk thought. It was going to do its own thing whether we existed or not. It was verdant, inconceivably dense, mighty, and so mysterious. Truth be told, at times it was intimidating.
I walked to the waterfall. There was a faint rainbow several meters wide in the mist. Hummingbirds flitted among the flowers, reminding me of something I had once heard: “Hummingbirds are the nerve endings of God.” I stripped off, stepping beneath the pounding torrent. Freezing water crashed, snatching my breath away, pummeling my head and shoulders like a brutal masseuse. I had to breathe out forcefully, trying to bear the enormous weight of the water. The gasps grew louder and louder until I found myself roaring, like a beast, an ape who roars because it feels so right. And yet even the roaring was drowned out by the thundering waterfall. The effect of the release was fantastically cleansing, a year of hardship washed away in the torrent of sound and water. As I got dressed a huge blue butterfly landed on my patrol pack.
Dusk fell and we gathered in the maloca and readied ourselves for the second ceremony. We sat in a semicircle around Humberto. Everyone was pensive, except for Richard and Humberto, who joked in Spanish and laughed. Miley had elected not to drink any ayahuasca this evening. Secretly I was relieved.
Humberto began to sing the icaros as we went up, one by one, raising the cup and saying “ Salud!” before gulping down the bitter, foul-tasting brew. We settled back in our places and waited for the fun and games to begin.
I felt nauseated almost immediately. Richard reminded us that vomiting is not looked upon with any kind of embarrassment or shame; it is a natural part of the ayahuasca healing process. In this context purging helps to release stuck emotions such as shame, fear, and guilt and to clear out cellular detritus.
Reuben retched loudly into his bucket. It sounded painful and seemed to go on for several minutes, each heave sounding utterly inhuman, emanating from the core animal part of himself that was way beyond caring about decorum, esteem, or any other fancy civilized constructs. The sound of his retching was likely to provoke the same response in me. Sure enough, I soon found myself undergoing an onslaught. I grabbed my bucket and emptied the very dregs of my stomach into it. My head was deep in the bucket, and my muffled moans were amplified as they resonated around the inside of the bucket and back out again. I didn’t care. Reuben had started the pukefest and I was on the tag team. This was Reuben’s twentieth ayahuasca session over nearly as many nights, and all of a sudden my view of him changed. I had respect for what he must have gone through. I now saw him not as a weak, addicted young man but as a veteran upchucker and, more importantly, as a champion, someone who stuck with it, even when the “it” is energy sapping and mind blowing. If this kid can survive this twenty times, I can get through it tonight .
Reuben’s purging sounded particularly agonizing. Between retches, he made faint feminine-sounding childlike gasps in an effort to catch his breath, making my heart wrench. Jesus, that poor boy! He needs healing. I couldn’t help but wonder what he had endured in his short life. As he continued to expel the contents of his guts, I did my best to send him supportive energy through the ether, hoping his discomfort would quickly pass. No chance. After what must have been the tenth bout of vomiting, he sounded absolutely wiped out. He was still struggling to catch his breath, just about managing to make the delicate sighs of a dying elderly lady, too weak now to even groan. I tried to approach the purging as matter-of-factly as Richard did. Get it out, get it over with, move on. Before long even Richard had joined in the puke chorus, a bona-fide ayahuasca veteran, and his retching didn’t sound any less painful than the rest of us.
With my vomiting over, feeling thoroughly drained, I settled back. A sense of serenity swept over me like warm a bath. The contrast was perplexing. I felt peaceful, cared for, as if ayahuasca were a mother stroking her child’s hair, calming, a cleansed and soothing release.
The brew w
ound its way through my system as I rocked gently to and fro in a wire mesh rocking chair. I could barely make out Richard’s and Reuben’s faint silhouettes in the darkness. Miley appeared to be asleep on the mattress to my left. The familiar sensation of boundaries dissolving. All physical limits lost their significance as I became absorbed into an infinite fabric, hitherto unseen, but now startlingly apparent. I was astonished at the clarity of the visions that seemed to originate in my mind’s eye, perhaps the third eye of esoteric lore, as dormant neurons became illuminated as the ceremony unraveled. Tendrils of colored light connected everything to everything in a cosmic web from which new realities emerged. Objects shone with a vividness and clarity beyond even our best HD technology. Somehow my own mind was manifesting bright white light. Inner landscapes were geometric, and I intuited a mathematical underpinning to everything. Geometry was the great connective tissue of the universe. My mind now wired, fired, and inspired. A cosmic reset was unfolding, a latent sense now activated, humming at exquisite levels of sensitivity like a heavy curtain had been raised to reveal—ta da! —the real real. There was humor in this intelligence; ayahuasca was like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat. There was a burgeoning sense of awakening as if the real nature of reality has been a secret guarded by elites and holy men throughout history and now I had become an initiate, a sense of awe, beyond wonder at the majesty of it all. Was this potion the source of a power knowledge that could be harnessed for both good and bad?
I was now fully connected. Connected to others, to nature, and, if there is such an entity, to the Source, feeling the presence of what I can only describe as holiness. On the spectrum of holy sensations, I felt “grind your forehead into the floorboards, outstretched arms, palms and face down, backside in the air” holy. A sense of utter surrender and worship. I felt love so deep that, for the first time ever, all I could do was worship. And of course I didn’t even know what I was worshipping! It had no name, no form—just pure, pure ineffable devotion.
Every single thing in existence that could be conceived and perceived—the lowliest to the highest, the most mundane to the most magnificent—was all bathed in this holiness. It was energy—a power, external and independent, a creative animating life force. The sacred Amazonian vine had delivered an experience that was truly, truly mystical.
Humberto walked over and stood before me, his body less than a foot away from my face. He began to sing. I could barely make out his silhouette it was so dark, but the power he imparted through his voice and this song felt all consuming—beyond mere human passion! I was subsumed into his emanating aura. Radiate, radiate, radiate, the words tumbled over and over in my mind.
Awed, I sat upright, but with my head bowed low. My hands were moving, seemingly independent of any conscious thought, alternating between two prayer positions, one with fingers entwined, hands clasped together, and the other with my fingers steepled, fingertips lightly touching in the classic prayer position. Dear God and Jesus Christ, please—what is happening to me? I felt humbled, although this massively understates the depth of my feeling. I had never experienced anything like this phantasmagoria overload. A master ayahuasquero was singing healing energy into me in the pitch blackness, a melodic foghorn in human form, hallucinatory images swirling around us, through us. A personal serenade from Pavarotti wouldn’t have come close. I could see, hear, and feel the sacredness of nature. I realized that our constitution is infused with a dualism that makes us a divine but self-destructing species, that we only exist at all thanks entirely to the whim and grace of nature. I began to understand that I was being made to feel, regardless of my own intentions, and whether I liked it or not, inspired. The sanctity and profundity were indescribable. I knew I would never be the same again. I’d been clubbed into higher sentience by an ancient wisdom so radiant it was humiliating. Laughing voices from forgotten epochs seemed to say, “That’ll learn him! Behold this, dummy! How does it feel to have your confidence mashed? Where’s it now, eh? Cocky bastard, weren’t you?”
Humberto stepped back, sparked up a mapacho, and leaned in closer, blowing a thick cloud of tobacco smoke over the top of my head, another one across my chest, and another down my back. He exhaled the smoke with a force that sounded completely inhuman, and I could tell by the vibration in his voice that he physically shivered and shook as he did so, his exertion primitive and primal. I felt blessed to be the recipient of his ministrations.
When he was done I asked Richard to translate for me. “Please tell the maestro that I believe he truly is a maestro.”
Humberto then moved over to where Miley was lying on the mattress and began to perform a healing. Reuben was next. Humberto performed with the same vigor with each of them. As he did this I felt my hands once again take on a life of their own, forming spontaneously into a prayer position. I had no idea why they were doing this, although the room was bathed in reverence and the prayer position felt the most natural and comfortable position for my hands to be in. The sense of being awash in divinity, an unfathomable holiness, permeated every facet of my being. I now understood why the indigenous peoples of this region revered ayahuasca. There was power here. This was the end of faith for me. Faith was redundant, a quaint anachronism, relegated to whimsy, the runt in the litter of dogged conviction. Just drink a cup of this and compare that to where faith gets you.
Reuben asked Richard to translate for him. “Can you ask the shaman if my mother is OK?” he asked. “Is she well?”
“Why?” asked Richard.
“Because I can feel her,” he explained, “and I’m worried about her.” He paused, then repeated in a voice sounding like a frightened little boy, “Is she safe?”
My heart ached listening to him.
“OK, wait a moment . . .” I heard Richard whisper something to Humberto. There was silence for about a minute, and then Humberto spoke softly to Richard in Spanish, who translated. “The maestro says your mother is safe. She is well. Don’t worry.”
“Thank you, maestro. Thank you,” Reuben said in a voice barely audible but full of relief.
We all sat in silence, in complete peace. Peace on Earth. It was real. Real peace, here deep, deep in the Amazon. The most tranquil hour of my life unfolded ineffably. Now was all that mattered, can matter, and will ever matter. This very perfect moment right now.
The ceremony had been a cosmic liftoff from the start, and now hours later, as it was coming to a close, it was blissful. I was more confident than ever that there is more to existence than our five physical senses allow us to perceive. That there is no limit to our perceptual capacities was the epiphany. I could now understand why people who have near-death experiences say they are irrevocably changed for the better. DMT and ayahuasca delivered those life-changing moments. I had just directly experienced that spirituality is just physics that we haven’t yet understood. Many people already knew this; I was just waking up.
Richard was keen to bring to South America what he’d learned from three years living in India and Thailand. He was combining continental wisdoms. He meditated by the river every morning. He told us about a special type of ayurvedic breathing technique that enhanced the feelings generated by ayahuasca. He said when he was practicing this breathing technique while under the influence of ayahuasca, he had became aware of an energy spinning in all of his chakra centers. A spinning ball of light had broken out from one of the chakras and whizzed up and down his body, from one chakra point to another. He said it was the most amazingly ecstatic feeling he’d ever experienced.
But other incidents occurred while I was staying there that made me realize this place could be dangerous—maybe not as dangerous as Afghanistan but still plenty to be aware of. It would have been naïve to arrive with expectations of sanitized safety. One of them occurred the next day.
Richard asked us if we would like to go on a boat trip along one of the backwater rivers that led to a large freshwater lake. Although we were all relatively weak from the shamanic diet and lack of slee
p, this sounded like an opportunity not to be missed. Miley, Reuben, Richard, and I piled into the homemade motorized canoe. Humberto joined us, along with the young local man who helped to make the ayahuasca.
We chugged along at about five miles an hour for nearly an hour. The jungle grew thick, right up to the banks on both sides of the river. I felt free and unburdened, enjoying the ride, intoxicated by the landscape, trailing one hand languidly in the warm crystal-clear freshwater. Every once in a while we’d see flashes of color pop in the green of the jungle, and Richard slipped effortlessly into a naturalist’s role, naming the tropical birds. Eventually, we entered a channel so narrow that the vegetation pressed into us from the banks. We had to use our arms to keep the branches out of our faces. The landscape changed again, the water channel opening into swamp terrain. We were surrounded by open water, with no solid land in sight. Plants were growing in clumps here and there, gnarly rooted and partially submerged, extending deep into the mud bottom that was at least ten feet below the waterline.
Then we got stuck. The propeller got caught in a discarded fishing net. We were miles from anywhere, no land to walk on and no way of communicating. A couple of us had mobile phones, but they were useless. We didn’t even have a spare paddle. Literally up a creek without one. I never imagined I would actually be in that situation. Humberto struggled for five minutes or so, trying in vain to free the propeller. I broke out my lock knife and offered it. Within a minute we were free and moving once more.
I was incredulous. I was supposed to be the dumb tourist here! Where was Richard’s knife? Or Humberto’s? Or anyone else’s? This was the Amazon for Christ’s sake. We were deep, deep in the jungle, God knows where in fact, and no one apart from me had thought to pack a knife or any other kind of emergency provisions. That little three-inch blade saved our collective bacon that day. “Carry a knife—save a life,” indeed! I had my patrol pack with me. Stuffed at the very bottom was a basic jungle survival kit that I had cobbled together from a marine recipe and a couple of others pulled from the Internet the week before the trip. I hadn’t mentioned it to Richard or any of the others because I’d have been embarrassed if they’d teased me about “preparation overkill.” But the irony was that without that knife we’d have needed every single item in the survival kit over the next few days as we waited, hoping to be rescued. The jungle is no benign oasis, a beautiful mirage; you still need to pay attention. This is not some la-la land. The natural power here can extinguish you like a draft on a lit match.