by alex seymour
César blew sacred tobacco smoke over her head, chest, and back in an attempt to cleanse her. The Shipibo women began to sing soothingly. Her hysterical laughter began to shift into long drawn-out wailing then degenerated into wracking sobs. The hysteria continued for another ten minutes before the combined work had an effect. César’s shamanic ministrations, the Shipibo women’s icaros, and Ben’s presence finally helped her regain composure. Or maybe by now she was just exhausted. She collapsed back down to her knees, her cries constrained until they once again became the ahhh sound. After a while she quieted down until she was merely whimpering.
Occasionally she laughed. There seemed to be some sort of telepathic connection between her and her twin, Ruth. They were lying twenty meters apart, but when Ruth giggled—obviously off in her own world—inexplicably Belinda’s arm would raise up high into the air like something was pulling it—or rather yanking it violently—like a puppet, and it remained there for the duration of Ruth’s giggle and not a moment longer. As soon as Ruth’s giggling stopped, Belinda’s arm flopped down heavily. The connection also worked in reverse. When Belinda giggled, in less than a single second we’d hear Ruth giggle too. Spooky.
Belinda finally became calm. It had taken a momentous effort for me to stay still and remain lying down while all the commotion had gone on within five feet. I felt relieved when the ceremony ended thirty minutes later. At the end of each ceremony, Andreas and Ben sang the same lullaby, and the more experienced voyagers would join in. The first lines of it were: “Like ripples on the ocean, they go around forever . . . Forever and ever, like a circle in the water.” Ben then played a tune of orchestral quality on his flute.
I was glad it was over. This ceremony’s second half had been horrendous. I looked over to Belinda and could hardly believe that she was fully conscious, now standing packing her kit away, like nothing had happened.
“You OK?” I asked.
“Yeah, sure,” she said. She even smiled.
I wanted to shout “Do you realize what just fucking happened? You were in the midst of a full-blown possession back there!” I didn’t push it—more distress was the last thing any of us needed. But I was troubled. At the opening of the ceremony, my mind had asked, “Show me something that isn’t perfect,” and I had concentrated on that for half an hour. Look what happened—something hellish! Her episode was as opposite of perfect as anything I could think of. Had I somehow been at least partially responsible for manifesting this crisis? What had Andreas been thinking to give such an intention? Had he known this would result? What was he exactly? Twenty-firstcentury wizard? White witch doctor? Psycho or savior? Mental or mentor? I was wracked by doubt. What were we really doing here? What the hell was going on? Trust, which I had just recently recovered, was again on shaky ground. This wasn’t a cult, but I had to admit that it was cultish. Intense visions, intentions that appeared to come true, and entities that took possession—there was no doubt that events on this journey had exceeded the limits of rationality. Things could evolve from “songs of praise” to “fright night” in one stormy psychedelic channel change. Everything about ayahuasca, Andreas, and the argonauts suddenly seemed inexplicable. I realized that Helmand wasn’t the only place I’d been to recently that had a heart of darkness.
I flipped my torch up to Belinda’s face. A beautiful girl—but one who now looked as though she had been battered by a hurricane. Sweat covered her skin, long brown hair plastered her face. Yet her eyes were lucid and clear, and she seemed OK, despite the dishevelment.
On the way back to the canoe, I figured now was as good a time as any to get a closer look at an unusual kapok tree that had caught the group’s attention when we had come into the clearing. It was gigantic, a fortress of integrity, ramrod straight with an immense circumference. Ten people linked hand by hand would be unable to encircle it. Smooth root webs rose ten feet aboveground, forming cavernous spaces capable of sheltering several people. I stepped between two of the largest roots, put both hands on the trunk, and gazed up. The trunk rose magnificently before the canopy fanned out, seemingly a hundred meters up. Then it just kept going, higher and higher. I had never seen a living thing project such majesty.
I noticed something fascinating. Six inches above my forehead an intricate symmetrical pattern, nearly a foot wide, had been carved into the bark. It also looked relatively fresh, chiseled within the last year or two. The design was reminiscent of classic ayahuasca-inspired visions, the same style seen on the artwork of the indigenous people. The hairs on the back of my neck rose. We had stumbled upon a tree that had been marked by indigenous people passing through, perhaps on a hunting trip and now long gone. It had been obvious that those unknowns had taken the utmost care crafting their carvings. Whoever had marked this giant must have felt the reverence and awe it was also inspiring in me. I decided that it was just the thing to help ground Belinda. I walked over to where she was standing, Ben alongside her.
“Come over and have a look at this,” I beckoned. “You won’t believe your eyes.”
I held Belinda’s elbow and gently guided her, while Ben followed behind us. She was extremely unsteady and wobbled and giggled as I led her. “OK,” I directed, “face the trunk. Put your hands on it at shoulder height, really feel it—and then slowly, slowly look up.”
“Wow! Oh, my God! Wow!”
Seconds later I drew her attention from the canopy down the trunk to the carved symbol just above her forehead. “Now, look at this . . .”
She stared blankly for a moment, the significance sinking in. Then her eyes widened, as wide and circular as an archery target. She nodded slightly, almost imperceptibly. Our faces were only a couple of feet apart, our eyes locked for a few moments. I wanted her to know, without telling her, that I understood that she’d just gone through something momentous, and now she was safe, back here on Mother Earth, among nature and friends.
Ben broke the spell, stepping forward to look. “Wow! Oh, my God!” His face broke into a huge smile, “Dude, that is awesome!”
We finally pulled ourselves away from the tree and headed back with the others to the canoe, and before long we were back on the ship, another day of the Mythic Voyage complete.
Months later, back home, during a phone call to catch up on news, I was able to hear Belinda’s version of her possession. Up until this phone call, it appeared that she had been taken over by an entity, and this was what had caused all her anguish and hence her screams. But according to her, nothing like that had happened. It had been nothing nefarious or supernatural. What she actually experienced was access to the trauma of childhood memories, when she had felt abandoned by her parents, scared, and helpless. She also had regressed to a time in her childhood before she could even talk, and during the reliving of it, under the influence of ayahuasca, she felt overtaken by darkness—a bad memory, not an entity—that she had no control over. It was a direct communication with her subconscious. She had screamed because she was drawn through a doorway back into this pain, and there was no way to get back. She said she was deeply thankful for Ben’s intervention. Through him she had found her way through the darkness, back to the present. When Ben had insistently reminded her, “Belinda, you know who you are!” she regained her power. But until that moment she had never felt so overwhelmed and powerless.
She related details of her childhood—her parents’ battle with alcoholism and her father’s abandonment when the twins were eight. Although she had her twin sister for support, she felt unseen as a child, unheard, and invisible. She had repressed much of that anguish, and she felt that the repressed emotion had displayed itself in her body, the tension causing her to have a constantly painful shoulder. So it was a possession of a kind—the possession of disempowering, painful memories. Her intention on the night of the ceremony had been to “feel trust in men again.” She believed ayahuasca provided her the perfect journey into the self to do that, enabling her to trust in the masculine again, to release her fear of abandonment. Be
n’s presence had helped with this. Despite the fact that she had been hysterical, she had felt the support of everybody in the circle. She told me she felt I had provided an aura of safety. No one had ever said that to me before. She described how good it felt to scream that night—to let out all the repressed anger and fear. She said that she had actually been proactive, “calling it in” to happen. It was interesting to hear that since that night she had had no further pain or problem with her shoulder. She was grateful for the experience and felt that through this healing she was now “ten times stronger.” She said ayahuasca helped heal her.
20
What is God?
T he next day, the final day of the voyage, I saw Andreas for a consultation. I wanted to speak to him about David R. Hawkins’s power versus force theory, eager to hear his views on how a person might become enlightened.
I had read an unforgettable book called Power versus Force by Hawkins, and it played on my mind. To simplify greatly, Hawkins said that most people throughout history have operated through self-preservation, seeking safety and fulfillment at the expense of others. They tend to operate through control and domination, violence, manipulation, and coercion. But as people evolve in consciousness, they move up in awareness, operating from reason, joy, and empathy—the more positive emotions. They move from relying on force to being able to judiciously experience power. Power in this context meant tolerance, cooperation, understanding, and love. Power is the awesome state of nature, where the inferior efforts of humanity were equivalent to force.
Based on my experience with psychedelics, rather than from anything I learned from religion, I had begun to sense this natural universal power much more profoundly. Life had granted me the experience of both force (the military) and natural power (the Amazon and ayahuasca). Force typically achieved short-term gains but generally did not last over the long term. Work with entheogens was showing another way—power through expansion of consciousness. This path revealed power in its spiritual sense: a natural intelligence/consciousness, supremely greater than humanity, benevolent and awe-inspiring, the animating energy of the universe, the web of life of which we all are a part and from which we can never be disconnected.
Hawkins had a successful psychiatry practice in New York for over thirty years. His theory was that all human beings can be measured using a technique called applied kinesiology to gauge where they sit on a linear scale of consciousness, ranging from 1 to 1,000, similar to the electromagnetic spectrum. Thus, a person’s consciousness can be measured on a scale (these numbers are an abbreviated summary): shame (20), apathy (50), fear (100), anger (150), courage (200), reason (400), unconditional love (500), peace (600), enlightenment (700–1,000). Mystics and holy men like Krishna, Mohammed, Jesus, and Buddha were extremely rare and were on the scale at over 700. Most of humanity scored at around the 200 mark. It seemed an outlandish theory but was interesting. His book had sold millions of copies and captured imaginations worldwide.
Hawkins wrote about an experience he had at age twelve when, through a near-death experience, he was in a state of being that he describes as “a suffusion of love that was beyond all description, beyond exquisite—that was timeless. . . . I knew that this was my reality. It melted my personal self into a form of non-existence into the infinite power of the love, which was overwhelming. It was a state of bliss.”
I was curious if Andreas agreed with Hawkins’s scale of consciousness, applying as it did not just to individuals but the entire human race. Based on the scale I wondered if there were groups of people, or even entire populations, that lagged behind others precisely because they were attached to a group. I explained the concept to him, then asked his opinion. He looked troubled, and after a long pause sighed, saying, “Yes, I’ve heard of this book and this scale of spiritual measurement. Within our culture we are obsessed with measurement. But it is very wrong to measure spirituality in this ridiculously linear and simplistic way. In fact, I’d say that this is monstrous!”
Melodramatic. Evidently, I’d overestimated my ability to articulate the essence of the book.
“What do you mean?”
“Imagine this situation.” He positioned some objects—cups, a water glass, knives, forks, a pair of glasses—on the table between us, then explained, embellishing his discourse with the objects closest to hand.
“Let’s say we have the Light over here,” he said, placing the water glass at a point far up the table. The Light obviously meant a supreme universal intelligence. He then pointed to the various everyday objects on the table and gave a symbolic meaning to each as he moved them around. “Then you can have a pope over here, a teacher over here, a young boy over here, and an alcoholic tramp over here. Now, if I move each one steadily, incrementally, toward the Light that sits over here in this direction, and then I stop moving them—when I finish, which one is now closest to the light?”
A trick question, but hey, let’s play the game.
“Well, it’s this one,” I said, picking up the cup that represented the boy, “because you’ve moved him closest to the Light.” I moved the cup so that it was adjacent to the water glass, almost touching it.
“No!” he said. “He is not nearest the light. They are all the same. No man is nearer to God than another. God is all pervasive, omnipotent. God is everywhere, in all of us all of the time. God is existence.”
This was the first time I had heard him ever explicitly mention the G word.
“So to use the scale in the book you speak about,” he went on, “to say that you start out in life on a path and you must strive to progress along that path in incremental steps toward enlightenment is wrong—very wrong. The Light is in all of us all of the time. An innate power residing in everyone, a higher force, intangible, immeasurable, fundamentally composed of love. God lives within us and we within it.”
I still thought Hawkins was on to something, especially after what I witnessed in Afghanistan. The tribal beliefs in pride, revenge, and shame were core pillars of their value system. The extremes to which they took these beliefs exceeded anything I had experienced before. It is a country, like others in that part of the world, where Pashtunwali is the tribal code of life. The code originated with the Pashtun peoples in pre-Islamic times and continues to this day, stretching far and wide in the tribal areas of countries across the region. Part of that code is badal (justice). If someone is killed, the family must avenge that murder by killing the perpetrator. Doing so is a matter of honor—and honor, in their eyes, is sacrosanct. But then the family of the man killed in revenge has an obligation to the same code, so they must defend their honor and avenge his killing. It was a generational vicious circle of feuds and violence. To me this code is rooted in scarcity, shame, and anger. After time spent in rural Afghanistan, I had come to believe that such codes persisted because of the endemic poverty. Fear stunts growth and cultural development; it breeds conflict and separation—an us-versus-them mentality. The result is that people operate from force (coercion, domination) rather than power (empathy, cooperation). Since I had come to the Amazon and begun working with ayahuasca, I was beginning to comprehend what natural power could really mean. In a short space of time, I had traveled the spectrum from force to power, having left the desolation of desert, stepping now into the abundance of the jungle.
I knew I didn’t have much time, as others were waiting for their consultations. I was considering what to ask next when Andreas did something unexpected. He told me about himself. Following a painful and troubled childhood, fraught with conflict and social exclusion, his salvation was delivered at age thirteen with a letter from his school announcing that he had been tested and was to be accepted into Mensa. They placed him squarely in the “potential genius” zone and the redemption was that, at last, he was perceived by all—family, teachers, peers—as a gifted child with an extraordinarily high IQ. Andreas then went on to tell me how, as an adult, following significant success, a series of events combined to bring everything crashing
down. Life as he knew it was lost, and it was an internal shift that saved him.
“I was a successful entrepreneur, with five different businesses. One was a clothing factory that provided a national sports team with their uniforms. But my health had deteriorated terribly. I suffered more than forty minor strokes and had a chronic problem with my blood that made it coagulate unnecessarily. That problem had its own side effect—causing me to put on weight. At times I ballooned to more than 350 pounds. I starved myself to get my weight down, eating solid food only on Saturdays. Even then I’d still put on five pounds a week. Due to these illnesses my businesses began to suffer. To make matters worse my wife left me, deciding she could no longer cope. I later found out she was having an affair. In any event, she left me, taking our two sons with her. At the same time I had an accident while walking in the street in which someone smashed into my knee, breaking it. I was wheelchair-bound for six months. After an operation on my knee, I became housebound while recovering and so couldn’t work. My businesses further deteriorated. I developed a fever and a urinary infection, which made pissing feel like passing molten lead. Every five minutes or so, one or two drops of black liquid would ooze out the end of my dick, which was intensely painful. I was unable to take any painkillers because they interfered with my stroke medicine. Then my body temperature began to fluctuate wildly, from fever to chills, swinging from 107.6 to 89.6°F. I felt I was losing my mind. Then I discovered that taking aspirin helped with the fever and so afforded me a two-hour period of lucidity. During one of these periods of clarity, I had an epiphany. I realized that I could change something—my mind! I could be happy simply by choosing to be. Of course, almost as soon as I had that insight, I doubted it. I asked myself, ‘Can I be really happy like this? With the urinary infection, smashed knee, blood/weight disorder, multiple strokes, fever, my family lost, and businesses in ruins?’ I decided I could—I could be happy. I began to laugh at myself, because I knew from that moment on, despite all outward appearances of pain and chaos, I was going to be happy. I underwent a transformational shift in consciousness, and from that moment on—and I can genuinely pin it down to that single moment—my way of being in the world shifted. I began rebuilding my life based on this newfound happiness.”