Psychedelic Marine

by alex seymour

  He was genuinely rueful, and I did my best to make him feel better without being patronizing. We agreed we were both on this trip on a quest for meaning and beauty that we could take back to our real-world lives. At the very least, we were here to enjoy novelty and strangeness, to stretch and grow. I reminded him that he, unlike many other people, had the freedom and opportunity to do things like this. Too many professions constrain people, shackling them in golden handcuffs, defining them, medicine being a prime example. He hadn’t allowed himself to be totally boxed in. He wasn’t just a surgeon. He was on his own quest. Most of us get so invested in our professions, they become a measure of our self-worth, and it confuses our real identities. He and I were each struggling to not let that happen.

  Although he appeared to be listening, his attention was on the tattoo that covered my shoulder and upper arm. He studied it as I spoke. When I finished he didn’t respond to anything I said. Instead, out of the blue he said, “Your tattoo is quite beautiful.”

  I was flattered. A British commando dagger was encircled by a laurel wreath, which itself was encircled by the flowing script “Royal Marines Commando.” Notably, he’d moved the conversation away from his life’s purpose. Accepting the cue, I jumped right in.

  “Can I ask you something important?”

  “Of course.”

  “Last night, Eddie said that the Mythic Voyage is a cult . . .”

  I shut up and studied his face closely, watching for his reaction to the C word. “What do you think?”

  His pale blue eyes met mine, and his brow furrowed. After some time he said emphatically, “It is not a cult.” He shook his head with confidence and repeated, “It’s not a cult.”

  His reasoning followed mine. There did, indeed, seem to be a cult of personality with Andreas. That was a given. He reasoned, “I don’t agree with everything Andreas says. He can be annoying and he can be rude—he even admits that himself—but he’s not running a cult. It’s kind of culty, perhaps, but not a cult.”

  “OK,” I said, as I had to Eddie, “but I’m still worried about what might be in the ayahuasca. You may have seen on his website that he has every intention of using mescaline at some point in this trip. And if he’s intent on bringing mescaline into the ceremony as a sacrament, in much the way that the Native North Americans traditionally harvest it from a cactus, then I think we have a right to know, don’t you?” I didn’t give him an opening and pressed on. “I don’t want mescaline mixed in. Who knows what the result would be if you mixed those two hallucinogens. It could be dangerous. And I definitely don’t want him adding datura! I know shamans here use it occasionally, but I think it’s too much of a risk when we don’t know the correct dosage. As a medical man, I’m sure you can appreciate that.”

  “Don’t worry,” he assured me. “All we’re drinking is ayahuasca. I trust Andreas. He’d tell us if it was anything else.”

  I thanked him and wandered away, brooding. I sat on deck, easing effortlessly into a daydream. The key element that I was struggling with deep down was 100 percent self-government—forever. Complete autonomy for the rest of my life. In the military, to a certain degree, they own you and you are complicit in the pact: y ou can micromanage me and I’ ll take the macroexperiential benefits. These benefits included, and were not limited to, free travel to wild and dangerous places, guaranteed adventure and excitement, the opportunity to make friends you can trust with your life, for life. The alliance of control within the corporate world is different. With that agreement you devote 70 percent of your alert problem-solving time to the company, and it, in turn, can grant you the wealth that helps contribute to a contented family. But I had had enough of both of these paradigms. I wanted to think for myself. The last thing I needed was another leader or any other element of control over my actions and time. I was becoming a free man; I could taste it. I just had to work through these last vestiges of resistance, which were like mist to a sailor who knows it will clear when the sun reaches its zenith.

  Andreas had reinforced that we are all empowered to consciously choose our own beliefs. So I followed his advice. Did this cult belief feel good? No. Then reject it. Cut it down with the simple application of first world rational thought. I worked to annihilate the last remaining doubts. Providing Andreas didn’t surreptitiously try to poison us, the likelihood was that I would get out of this place alive. I had to acknowledge his track record. People came back over and over again, endorsing him and the voyage. Even when the rest of us were swimming in the fog of ayahuasca, he always had his game on, lucid and on point. I had never once seen him pause for thought—his mind sharp and instant. I made an effort to ditch my paranoia right there and then. This entire episode had been a self-inflicted fear burden. Maybe the lesson here for me was trust. Hadn’t that been one of my intentions in an earlier ceremony—to learn how to trust completely? Maybe this had been a test?

  That became the thought I mulled over and over as we sailed on downstream. After a day or so of orchestrated mind manipulation, I reconvinced myself that I was a lucky bastard, ready for deep immersion into what friends at festivals referred to as “the fuck-about zone.” It was playtime.

  18

  Question Authority, Trust Yourself

  Nature loves courage.

  TERENCE MCKENNA

  A s well as Orson Welles, Andreas, in fairness, was equally part Deepak Chopra and Eckhart Tolle. Winner of the world’s most anarchic tour guide. I felt sheepish about my prior snap judgment. I could see him now as an enabler, guiding those in need out of the deadening constraints of pain, doubts, and self-imposed roles and rules.

  You had to give him credit: he envisioned this entire voyage and ran it with an iron fist cloaked in a velvet glove. He liked weird and embraced it, just as I did. Besides, the guy had balls. A journey of this type was risky. Like Richard from La Kapok Center, he was a pioneer, a frontiersman, with an unshakable conviction for the sacramental potential of ayahuasca and other plant-based entheogens. He knew that since the beginning of time, humans have felt compelled to shift their state of consciousness, that we are both seekers of pleasure and mystery, that our curiosity propels us. The Afghans have their opium, and the Amazonians have ayahuasca. We shared the view that there was nothing wrong with most psychedelics as long as you remained their master. He had tapped into the zeitgeist that secular living, archaic belief-based religions, and rampant, unchecked capitalism are not sustainable or satisfying for millions of people. Aspects work, but there were gaping chasms of inadequacy. The growing global search for deeper spiritual meaning was an attempt to address this. He realized that on a fundamental level the philosophy of “he who dies with the most toys wins” doesn’t even qualify as a bad joke and that the people of the Amazon had glimpsed the solution. When he kept his tendency toward megalomania in check, Andreas could be inspiring.

  Here in the Amazon trust truly was the order of the day. In Afghanistan we had maps that were so detailed that every single mud hut and crumbling compound wall could be identified. We knew where we were to the nearest fifty meters. Contrast that with the Amazon. Here, I’d relinquished responsibility for navigating entirely and had no idea where I was to the nearest five hundred miles. A counterintuitive paradox: I was lost and had never felt safer.

  I resolved to go into the ceremony that night with a clear and strong intention: “Show me an important truth.”

  During the day the Shipibo women gave us flower baths with a bucket of clear river water in which scented flowers had been steeped. We took turns on the upper deck, the women lightly scrubbing each person down from head to toe. It was wonderful, and the flower blossoms smelled heavenly.

  In the afternoon the skipper moored the ship at a confluence where three channels joined. Some of the women squealed in delight as pink freshwater dolphins jumped in and out of the river, playfully circling the boat. Ben, Andreas’s right-hand man, entertained us by performing backflips and somersaults off the bow into the river.

 
Ben was Andreas’s lieutenant, assisting him on every Mythic Voyage. He had the feline quality of a muscular jungle cat. Thirty, supercharged with positivity, he stood over six feet tall and had shoulder-length blond hair and blue eyes, obviously in his prime. It was his job to recce and prep the jungle ceremony locations. He also ran some of the ceremonies and morning workshops. For the first few days, he’d been busy with his duties, so when I finally did get to spend some time with him, I realized he had the air of something extraordinary about him. He had grown up in Holland and so spoke with a Dutch accent and had lived in Los Angeles from the age of sixteen. He was a dedicated devotee to the Burning Man Fesitval—that iconic temporary community of free spirits and artists who convene in the Nevada desert every August. He had spent five years as a professional footballer and now was an accomplished artist and musician: he played the flute with beguiling beauty. He had a small land holding in Colombia where he grew crops and had traveled extensively throughout Central and South America earning a living as a snake hunter milking venom to make antivenoms for snakebites. He learned this trade from a master snake hunter, but that’s another story. Much of his time over the past two years had been spent campaigning to free slaves in India and donating his art to civic projects that helped the freed slaves assimilate back into the world. So there you have it—a somewhat preposterous smorgasbord of good qualities. He grinned a lot, was always affable, and his integrity and openness, combined with his good looks, were no doubt why the women on board especially seemed drawn to him.

  It grew dark—time for the ceremony. Ashore in the jungle we each took a cup of ayahuasca and settled in our places, waiting for the magic show to begin. Within ten minutes a single thought came crashing into my consciousness with a force that felt physical, beyond mere thought—a message delivered as a pulse of energy: “Have No Fear!”

  Without subtlety or nuance, the words had individual power: Have—No—Fear. Where the hell did that come from? I had asked to be shown a truth but was this true? Considering all I’d put myself through with the whole cult meltdown, I doubted it. I feigned disinterest, shifting thoughts, but the words crashed into awareness again and again. It was becoming clear now that a portion of my brain/consciousness had been utterly dormant—waiting for the key to be turned. My ego, along with the fear paired with it, had been holding me back from revealing my true nature, and it had done so since early childhood.

  At one point during the ceremony, I became aware of strange breezes; nothing like normal breezes, they seemed to defy physics. Probably some kind of meteorological phenomenon I’d never heard of. Each stream of air felt like it had a form, as thin as a pencil. One of them had a curious movement that started from apparently nowhere below my chin, flowed over my chin and the tip of my nose, and then continued upward between my eyes to my forehead. It was very weird. Almost as if someone were blowing on my face from chin to forehead with a straw. What was going on? A stream of air, no insects fluttering, it didn’t seem natural; in fact, it felt supernatural, like a ghost might feel if it brushed against bare skin. I really didn’t know what to make of it but let it continue to flow. Eventually it stopped, just as suddenly as it had begun.

  Minutes later there was more strangeness. I moved my head to one side and felt the whole side of my face enter a cooler patch of air. Tilting my head back, the air was normal, warm again. I moved my head back into the cold patch—just to test it—still cold. I repeated this process several times to make sure it wasn’t my imagination. Hot then cool, hot then cool. Whole chunks of air surrounding my body appeared to have different atmospheric properties. It was so perplexing.

  The cacophony of a billion insects chirped, rasped, and buzzed. There was an opening in the jungle canopy to the moon and stars that funneled light directly into the center of the ceremonial space.

  I began to shiver. The shamanas’ icaros were powerful tonight, each of them singing different songs, melodies blending to make one gorgeous interwoven sound. Some of their voices were implausibly highly pitched, like cartoon characters digitally manipulated to sound almost frenzied. It would have been comical if it weren’t so sensational. It is almost impossible to describe the effect of the icaros. Sound modulates consciousness; it plays with it, transforms it—as if the shamanas were conductors, orchestrating minds with tunes. Their voices crafted energy into sumptuously colored patterns, complex matrices of energy that revealed the core of reality. It was so obvious now how everything is made of energy. Their songs were the brushes of an energy palette, painting the invisible into the visible, sounds generating light.

  One of the tiny shamanas crept over, sat cross-legged at my feet, and directed her song right at me, stretching her arms to the treetops, gently waving her hands aloft in reverence. I could feel the vibrations from her song physically reverberate through me. The shivering intensified, my body processing vibratory waves of pleasure. Fireflies floated over her, landing on her shoulders and head, some of them appeared to synchronize their twinkling—glittering like Christmas lights—in time with the rhythm of her song. It was mesmerizing.

  The ayahuasca took me deeper. Looking up, I saw the full moon was centered within the canopy opening. Its radiance was of divine proportions—like a ten-million-candle spotlight beamed from a benevolent cosmos. The brilliance accentuated the surrounding darkness of the jungle. The drifting clouds morphed constantly into new shapes, each representing an expression of a comforting cosmic code. Unfathomably deep neon geometry flooded the blackness behind the moon and stars, spiraling to infinity. I was dumbfounded as beauty spilled from the dazzling vista, causing my jaw to slowly drop, slacker than a sail without wind. I glanced to my right, at Rebecca—she was exactly the same as me: eyes and mouth wide open, staring transfixed, bathed in wonder. I began to comprehend that ocean upon ocean of limitless creative potential poured endlessly from the heavens, that we are embedded in an energetic matrix of inexpressible concentrated beauty, that the very essence of existence is unconditional love.

  This must be what it feels like to die, I thought, as my body vibrated and my consciousness seemed to merge with matter, beyond the boundaries of my physical self. Death is a process, not an end, and now I knew what it felt like to be immersed in that process, at least in part. As my body shivered and vibrated, I felt that in some inexplicable way I was ascending. This must be ascension of a kind. Or perhaps the heavens were descending. It was hard to tell. I sensed the ultimate connection, a oneness with the Great Mystery so powerful that I thought the surge of emotion and insight might short-circuit my nervous system. Either that, or I’d puke, roll over, and freak out, simply unable to cope. The potency—the avalanche of intelligence and information beaming its way like a laser beam—held me on a knife’s edge between reverence and breakdown. The plants were teaching me that instead of knuckling down, working hard, and following the direction of leaders, we had to instead engage the application of limitless imagination. The lesson, even if I had the audacity to try to ignore it, was to ditch fear and create something.

  Andreas approached. I lay on my back, and he knelt down next to me and laid his hand over my heart and whispered words of compassion in my ear. Beads of sweat, like translucent bubble wrap, dappled the top of his head, each one encapsulating its own tiny rainbow of colors. His face morphed wildly from a jester to a Mexican wrestler’s mask, then into a series of rapid-fire demonic caricatures, each mask changing by the second. There was unmistakable humor behind the archetypes—a cosmic joke. The images contrasted with the kind and gentle words he spoke, and eventually I had to close my eyes to keep from being overwhelmed by the strangeness of the masks transforming his face.

  The new “empathy” sense was back, like a kind of telepathy. I couldn’t read anyone’s thoughts—obviously—but I had an overpowering sense of how people nearby were feeling.

  I didn’t want this ceremony to end, but when it did I took my time packing up my stuff. As we made ready to leave, I saw one of the twins still sitting on her matt
ress, crying quietly. I went over. “Are you OK?” I asked, gently. I reached out and held her hand.

  “It’s so beautiful,” she whispered between sobs. “So beautiful . . .”

  Out of nowhere my head began to spin in a wave of nausea. I reached for a nearby bucket and purged heavily. Ben was close by and laughed at me. “It’s a beautiful thing to do, isn’t it?” he said, as I tried to regain some breath and composure. He went on. “It’s like a portal to my higher self, my higher authentic self—the fully optimized one. Like a celestial promise—I break through a boundary and it feels like I’ve shed a layer, don’t you think?” Then he concluded with, “And I hope you said thank you!”

  My head was still gurgling in the bucket. He threw his head back laughing at my gasps, knowing full well I was in no state to respond.

  We snaked in single file back down the path through the jungle to the river. I was at the back of the line and began to hear gasps of what sounded like joy and uproarious surprise. I quickened my pace to catch up and see what the commotion was about. As I approached the canoe, the sounds became louder. No mistaking it—something unexpected and very pleasing was occurring ahead. Once able to break free of the forest, I saw people standing on the shore looking up at the sky, groaning with pleasure. I followed their gaze. Above was the most unusual and sublime cloud formation I’d ever seen. Nestled against a jet black background, long, cylindrical cirrus clouds striped across the entire sky—there were hundreds of them, identically sized, shaped, and spaced. The sight was beyond epic. Every single cloud was exactly the same shape. Perfectly identical—even down to the regularity of the spacing between them. Between the clouds stars shone brilliantly, like backlit diamonds, so very, very bright that the river itself was alight, shining with their reflections.