This piece goes a ways to redeem National Geographic for a misguided program about the crop circle phenomenon that runs repeatedly on their cable channel. In the March issue of National Geographic Adventure, this personal account of the writer's trips to Peru to ingest a hallucinogenic substance, which comes from the perspective of it being about healing rather than hurting, is a very good thing indeed.
Ayahuasca is in wide use in the States (I don’t know about the rest of the world). I think of it as this era's LSD, although it's always taken under guidance, either with South American shamans or with people who have been trained by shamans from any of several South American countries, where some of its usage is in religious ritual. (There's a case to allow its sacramental use by a New Mexico branch of the Brazilian Uniao do Vegetal Church that has made it to the Supreme Court, and, in February, with Roberts presiding, the Court ruled 8-0 to let the usage continue while the ultimate conclusion is being reached — a so-far great victory!)
This is the first page of four, and if you get on the site you'll see that it just gets better as it goes further off the charts with insights into the human psyche and the fierce and glorious battle to be waged for personal freedom. In this society, where there is much yearning to cleanse dysfunction and considerable meditating and praying in quest of inner peace, ayahuasca affords a rocket ride to what's beyond our 3-D reality shell. This is one of the best things I've ever read about journeying — for how well it's written, how courageous the writer is, and what it taught me about what is possible. I hope you find it as valuable as I did.
Deep in the Amazon jungle, writer Kira Salak tests ayahuasca, a shamanistic medicinal ritual, and finds a terrifying—but enlightening—world within.
Page one:
For centuries, Amazonian shamans have used ayahuasca as a window into the soul. The sacrament, they claim, can cure any illness. The author joins in this ancient ritual and finds the worlds within more terrifying—and enlightening—than ever imagined.
I will never forget what it was like. The overwhelming misery. The certainty of never-ending suffering. No one to help you, no way to escape. Everywhere I looked: darkness so thick that the idea of light seemed inconceivable.
Suddenly, I swirled down a tunnel of fire, wailing figures calling out to me in agony, begging me to save them. Others tried to terrorize me. “You will never leave here,” they said. “Never. Never.”
I found myself laughing at them. “I'm not scared of you,” I said. But the darkness became even thicker; the emotional charge of suffering nearly unbearable. I felt as if I would burst from heartbreak—everywhere, I felt the agony of humankind, its tragedies, its hatreds, its sorrows. I reached the bottom of the tunnel and saw three thrones in a black chamber. Three shadowy figures sat in the chairs; in the middle was what I took to be the devil himself.
“The darkness will never end,” he said. “It will never end. You can never escape this place.”
“I can,” I replied.
All at once, I willed myself to rise. I sailed up through the tunnel of fire, higher and higher until I broke through to a white light. All darkness immediately vanished. My body felt light, at peace. I floated among a beautiful spread of colors and patterns. Slowly my ayahuasca vision faded. I returned to my body, to where I lay in the hut, insects calling from the jungle.
“Welcome back,” the shaman said.
The next morning, I discovered the impossible: The severe depression that had ruled my life since childhood had miraculously vanished.
Giant blue butterflies flutter clumsily past our canoe. Parrots flee higher into treetops. The deeper we go into the Amazon jungle, the more I realize I can't turn back. It has been a year since my last visit, and I'm here again in Peru traveling down the Río Aucayacu for more shamanistic healing. The truth is, I'm petrified to do it a second time around. But with shamanism—and with the drinking of ayahuasca in particular—I've learned that, for me, the worse the experience, the better the payoff. There is only one requirement for this work: You must be brave. You'll be learning how to save yourself.
The jungle camp where our shamanistic treatment will take place is some 200 miles (322 kilometers) from the nearest town, Iquitos, deep in the Peruvian Amazon. Beside me are the other four members of my tour. There is Winston, the biggest person I've ever met. Nearly seven feet tall (two meters), surely over 400 pounds (181 kilograms), he has a powerful body that could easily rip someone apart. I expect him to be a bodyguard or a bouncer; turns out he's a security guard. But there is something else about him. Something less tangible. It seems to rest in the black circles beneath his eyes, the face that never smiles, the glances that immediately dismiss all they survey. Winston does not seem like a happy man.
Then the others: Lisa, who has a master's degree from Stanford and is now pursuing her doctorate in political theory at Duke University; Christy, who just quit her job counseling at-risk teens to travel around South America; and Katherine, Christy's British friend. By all appearances, our group seems to be composed of ordinary citizens. No New Age energy healers. No pan flute makers. No hippies or Rastafarians or nouveau Druids. Christy betrays only a passing interest in becoming a yoga instructor.
And then there is me, who a year ago came to Peru on a lark to take the “sacred spirit medicine,” ayahuasca, and get worked over by shamans. Little suspecting that I'd emerge from it feeling as if a waterlogged wool coat had been removed from my shoulders—literally feeling the burden of depression lifted—and thinking that there must be something to this crazy shamanism after all.
And so I am back again.
I've told no one this time—especially not my family. I grew up among fundamentalist atheists who taught me that we're all alone in the universe, the fleeting dramas of our lives culminating in a final, ignoble end: death. Nothing beyond that. It was not a prescription for happiness, yet, for the first couple decades of my life, I became prideful and arrogant about my atheism, believing that I was one of the rare few who had the courage to face life without the “crutches” of religion or, worse, such outrageous notions as shamanism. But for all of my overweening rationality, my world remained a dark, forbidding place beyond my control. And my mortality gaped at me mercilessly. Lisa shakes me from my reveries, asking why I've come back to take another tour with the shamans.
“I've got some more work to do,” I say. Hers is a complicated question to answer. And especially personal. Lord knows I didn't have to come back. I could have been content with the results of my last visit: no more morbid desires to die. Waking up one morning in a hut in the sultry jungles of Peru, desiring only to live.
Still, even after those victories I knew there were some stubborn enemies hiding out in my psyche: Fear and Shame. They were taking potshots at my newfound joy, ambushing my successes. How do you describe what it's like to want love from another but to be terrified of it at the same time? To want good things to happen to you, while some disjointed part of you believes that you don't deserve them? To look in a mirror and see only imperfections? This was the meat and potatoes of my several years of therapy. Expensive therapy. Who did what, when, why. The constant excavations of memory. The sleuth-work. Patching together theory after theory. Rational-emotive behavioral therapy. Gestalt therapy. Humanistic therapy. Biofeedback. Positive affirmations. I am a beautiful person. I deserve the best in life.
Then, there's the impatience. Thirty-three years old already, for chrissakes. And in all that time, after all that therapy, only one thing worked on my depression—an ayahuasca “cleansing” with Amazonian shamans.
For pages 2-4 get on the website:
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/0603/features/peru.htmlFrom William Ridinger [ridinger@msn.com]
www.maps.org. They have made remarkable progress with the federal government in the U.S. and other countries as well in getting formal approvals for psychedelic research. It is amazing that under the current regime there are studies being allowed with LSD, psilocybin, and MDMA (Ecstasy) to treat a variety of conditions (also the recent decision from the Roberts court upholding religious use of ayahuasca). The MDMA study is particularly interesting to me, because I got rid of some pretty awful depressive symptoms myself with it. Used carefully and with respect and reverence, many of the entheogens and psychedelics can be of great value to our species, as the ancient peoples all over the world knew.Thanks for the interesting posting on ayahuasca. It has certainly become a popular eco-tourist destination, as the article clearly shows. I have heard thru my grapevine of many amazing cures, including various types of cancers.
If you are not familiar with it already, check out an organization that I belong to – M.A.P.S., the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies
As to our previous conversations about crop circles and particularly the Arecibo reply, I continue to be amazed that the scientific community disdains to look carefully at this phenomenon. I think there are many messages contained within the designs that we are simply overlooking, but I haven't the brainpower to decipher. I wish I was a better geometer.
My main pursuit has been interspecies communication with whales and dolphins. I knew Dr. Lilly and I am convinced he was right about them possibly being the smartest species on the planet. If you look at their behavior versus what you see out of homo sapiens, it would seem obvious which specie is smarter!! I have spent a lot of time out on the ocean around Maui hanging out with humpbacks and dolphins and they do communicate a lot with me and have given me some extraordinary glimpses into their multi-dimensional world. They have much larger and more convoluted cortical areas and have perceptual abilities far beyond what we are capable of, that much is known to science. But they have been here in their current forms at least 10 times longer than we have and they have evolved many perceptual abilities we cannot even conceive of at this point in our development/evolution.
Thanks as always for stimulating ideas and sources.
From Suzanne to William
I've spent time with Charlie Grob, who has told me promising things about MDMA studies. Horrible that the usage has been restricted — such a valuable therapeutic substance. What a backwards world this is, set up for the wrong values, but of course now scraping bottom as far as a guiding ideology is concerned. I was heartened to get on the MAPS site and see so much study going on.
There is pretty significant circle work that's carried on related to number and geometry, where the circles have provided a virtual curriculum. That may be the be all and end all of the circles — perhaps all to demonstrate to us that we're not alone. If they were trying to say something beyond that, I wouldn't imagine they'd be so enigmatic about it. When you tune into what is being delivered, you do find yourself enmeshed as opposed to standing outside something looking in, and winning us over so that we are truly united may be their game plan.
Too bad the whales and dolphins would make such clammy bedfellows…
From: William to Suzanne
Amazing interconnects on the MDMA study sponsored by MAPS. I'm a psychologist, and I was attending a seminar on eating disorders to get some of my annual CEU's required to keep the license current in Texas (the UT Southwestern Med School was the entity who put the seminar together) and I ran into one of the main presenters in the hallway. he had just given a talk on the etiology of eating disorders and of course he spoke at length about the treatment of PTSD. I asked him if he knew of the use of MDMA for that, and he smiled and said, “Yes, I do.” I then told him I was a member of MAPS, and he smiled even more broadly and shook my hand and said, “That's a good organization.” Then he told me he was a friend and colleague of Michael Mithoefer, the psychologist who is the principal investigator for the study. We had a delightful but rather covert discussion and it was an interesting coincidence, I thought.
The band YES is one of my favorites. Jon Anderson wrote a song that says, “Celestial travelers have always been here with us, set in the homes of the universe we have yet to go….Countless expansions will arrive and flow inside of us…my friend he of fantasy, dancing with the spirit of the age.” (From the CD “Tormato.”) As we get a little smarter, perhaps we will learn how to actually communicate with these influences, and with the cetaceans as well. I believe I have pretty good dialogue with the cetaceans already, and it really helps to be able to get out in the wild and get face time. Not an easy thing here on Maui, but sometimes doable and always kind of exciting.
Thanks for the personal reply. I was thinking you may have gone to Basel, for Dr. Hoffman's 100th birthday party, and Dr. Grob was there too. I almost got to come, but at the last minute, it didn't work out. Shucks, I would have loved to have been there. I have ordered a signed copy of Dr. Hoffman's book; still waiting on that to arrive.
From: Kischi [anaim@argentina.com]
I've always been attracted to ayahuasca and reading this article has been an amazing adventure for me. I feel I have been there with Kira Salak, sharing her inner journey. I want to thank her for sharing the story. In Lak'ech.
From Suzanne to Kischi
I felt the same way. What does “In Lak'ech” mean?
From Kischi to Suzanne
Thanks for answering, I enjoy theconversation.org a lot, you do a great work.
“In Lak'ech” is a greeting the Mayan used; it means “I am another yourself,”
Goodbye Suzanne, keep up the good work. Good work. God work.
From: Anne Baring [annebaring@freeuk.com]
Thank you so much for that latest posting. I found it riveting to read and very moving too. It reminded me of “Dark Night, Early Dawn” by Christopher Bache. How many centuries will it take before these methods of healing are used in our society?
From Suzanne to Anne:
. Maybe the crash of George Bush will open us up to more, given all the post traumatic stress our warring is creating.From: Allan Brown [darroch@dircon.co.uk]I was heartened to discover that there's some decent amount of research going on: http://www.maps.org/research
Thanks for this fantastic story, most uplifting thing I’ve read in a while.
From: Diane Jonkey@aol.com [Dmjonkey@aol.com]
WOW. Thank You Suzanne this is an amazing article.
From: ivydegrase [arcangeluz17@yahoo.com]
Very enlightening reporting… are you mailing these to heads of states? Do you recall when Mother Teresa visited in the U.N., and asked that they pray, the reaction was all refused and made fun of her, all these would be leaders of nations full of egotistical pretense?
Having experienced the out of body experience I am aware that our soul is on a journey incarnating on the Earth, and we need to put our mind and body at the service of our soul, as the egregore….to return to the one and All! many thanks
From: Janie Noble [mind7@mindspring.com]
Astonishing! Thanks
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