Rak Razam
[disinfo ed.'s note: the following is an excerpt from Aya Awakenings: A Shamanic Odyssey by Rak Razam]
Iglesia Matriz, Iquitos
The internet café is an invaluable gringo meeting spot and later in the day I bump into Theo Valis there. He’s been gone on a week-long botanical expedition about twelve hours down the Rio Ucayali, then further down a tributary to a remote Mastes village and another five hours trek into the jungle, not too far from the Brazilian border. There, in a crude open hut he did a mini-dieta and drank ayahuasca for a week with don Gallindo, a seventy-five-year-old maestro curandero who specializes in admixture plants.
Theo says the maestro showed him how powerful ayahuasca could be in potentiating other plants—not just ones containing DMT—and that he received an immense healing. During an eight-hour session he says he also received an icaro, despite repeatedly telling the ayahuasca spirit that he was not able to remember melodies.
Theo’s also spent the last week making his own brew out in the jungle and distilling it down to the clear plastic water bottles like the natives do. Now he’s off to Europe and then a trance festival in Portugal, and is selling the ayahuasca for U.S. $200 a bottle to help fuel his trip.
The whole thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth, though. I have this underlying feeling that the sacredness of ayahuasca is being commodified and diluted by hawking it in the internet cafes alongside the chips, cola, and calling cards. But that’s the business of shamanism, I guess, a perfect blend of the archaic with the modern. I’d seen worse transactions just minutes before while on the net.
As of July 2006, typing “ayahuasca” as a key word search into Google came up with 865,000 entries. The forums at ayahuasca.com are the central point of the global online interest in the vine, which was itself one of the main catalysts for Alan Shoemaker to start the Shaman Conference here in Iquitos. There were hundreds of mentions by professional anthropologists and academics, as well as the web pages of spiritual seekers and religions like the UDV and Santo Daime. There were promotional sites for all the jungle lodges and healing retreats throughout South America. And then there was the dark side of the business of shamanism—the free markets.
You can even order ayahuasca over eBay, I was surprised to see—“Ayahuasca vine, Banisteriopsis caapi, Shaman Drink 500gr,” the ad read, only $24.67 and counting. That’s 12.50 pounds U.K. after three bids for 500g of the vine with one hour and six minutes left before bidding closes. It’s listed in the Home & Garden > Metaphysical & New Age > Other Metaphysical & New Age section and 164 people had viewed it. Sold from and shipping only to the U.K. What a clever plant, this ayahuasca, to go from sacred indigenous medicine to the latest global fad, in a scant fifty years.
After Theo leaves I spot Chuck by the door and catch up with him for a rare cerveza down by the boulevard. Chuck’s dressed in blue Levis and a white t-shirt, topped off by sunglasses and his trademark Andy Warhol-like shock of silver hair: the all-American gringo. Chuck’s one of the first wave of Western ayahuasqueros and he’s been staying in Peru for his summer holidays off and on since ’79, hanging with the Indians. He’s a Carlos Castaneda-era Indiana Jones who knows his way around the scene here, but for all his macho jungle adventuring, he’s also a pretty sensitive guy. You don’t do ayahuasca for almost thirty years without it rubbing off on you.
“I’ve had a lot of psychic experiences since I was a child and I believe very much in the spirit world,” Chuck says, cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other, bearing his soul to me here in the midday sun. “I don’t believe it’s something that is dreamed up in the human mind. I know there’s some other world out there, but usually it’s inaccessible.”
Tourists and locals mingle along the paved sidewalk of the boulevard, clogged with European-style cafes and bars. Clusters of merchants selling tourista handicrafts hang by the marble pillared wall with their wares laid out on blankets before them. On the corner that same determined gaggle of Shipiba grandmothers wave their manta veils at passing gringos, but they recognize me and know I won’t play the game.
“Ayahuasca opens up that world, but sometimes I become very sad when I take it because it’s telling me things of sadness, about what the human race is doing to the earth,” Chuck says wistfully, then he looks off at the dance of the manta veils as they billow in the breeze and the information grids engrained on them twist and turn like they’re alive. “And I’m one of the guilty ones, I don’t consider myself outside the guilt as far as what’s going on.”
He holds up his cerveza bottle as if to say, see, here we are consuming, part of the Westernization of the jungles. We might be ayahuasca seekers but we’re all still tourists, we all go home after our experiences here, however transformational.
Since the conference ended Chuck’s been hanging with Javier, a curandero in Belén who’s currently treating a thirty-three-year-old mother with eight kids who has a cancerous growth as big as a grapefruit on her neck. The plant medicines have cleansed it once, but it’s come back again and Javier’s worried about it, Chuck says. He’s a master healer and it’s a rare privilege for a Westerner to drink with him, so when Chuck offers to take me along to his next ceremony Tuesday night there’s no hesitation—for the story never ends.
After a month in Peru I’ve barely scraped the surface of the mystery of ayahuasca. I’ve seen the science of curanderismo and the business of shamanism from the inside and the out, and the only real thing I understand is that the rabbit hole goes deeper than I ever suspected, and my thirst to travel down it grows.
***
Tuesday afternoon I meet Chuck outside the Yellow Rose and share a motorcarro down to Puerto Bellavista Nanay, the busy main port of Iquitos. We’re headed to a little property called Love Creek, where Javier holds his ayahuasca ceremonies. As our motorcarro enters the busy port we pass Javier and some of his Peruvian clients standing in front of the marble arc statue at the entrance to the markets and we instruct our driver to pull over.
Javier’s wearing non-descript Western clothes straight out of the Belén markets: blue Converse All-Star sneakers, tan canvas shorts with deep pockets, a blue Tommy Hilfiger t-shirt, a watch, and a baseball cap. He’s got a classic Peruvian face, rounded and Buddha-like, white plastic rosary beads trailing down over his little potbelly. He gives us a big smile and shakes our hands warmly, radiating a happy, contented energy, like he’s just had a Sunday roast and dessert and is about to sit down and have a nap. When he smiles a gold filling in one of his front teeth shines through—his wife is studying to be a dentist, and medicine runs in the family.
With him are two guys on holiday from Lima, where they work for the Ministry of Health in undisclosed capacities, and who will be trying ayahuasca for the first time tonight. They both speak a smattering of English and we exchange pleasantries as we thread through the crowd. The colorful wooden market buildings are bustling with shoppers weaving through the stalls, stopping to sample selections of fresh fish on open-air grills, rice, fruit, and vegetables. Workers cart endless boxes of supplies down to the river’s edge and waiting boats that feed the hungry townships along the river.
Along the dirt road leading down to the water pole houses have been built, raised ten or more meters above the waterline. These wooden buildings house bars and restaurants filled with local Peruvian men drinking cervezas at any time of the day or night on the sprawling verandas, like a slice of the old Wild West.
As we climb into a local collectivo boat I’m fascinated by the number of floating houses which rise and fall with the fortunes of the river, and the families that go about their business from them. Children are jumping into the water and bathing while women do the washing off the back, all of them oblivious to the empty water bottles and rubbish that laps at the shore in a constant tide. It all ends up in Brazil anyway, so why worry about it, one of the boatmen tells me with a wide smile.
Chuck’s brought yet another new machete with him as a present for Javier’s parents in the village. “It only costs U.S. $2 but to them it’s invaluable, they can clear the land and make improvements,” he says proudly. Chuck likes machetes, I remember. In the jungle on the way to the ceremony with Percy he’d swung that blade with the glee of a white Westerner cut loose from the bounds of civilization at last.
“He’s a bit like an action hero, like Chuck Norris,” one of the Peruvians opposite me jokes as Chuck brandishes his machete with a crazed look in his eye, hamming it up. It’s no wonder he carries a machete around everywhere—he’s been warned of an anaconda in the area and he’s got a fear of the giant snakes in him. Javier says the big anacondas have the power to wrap themselves around a tree and just pull it up by the roots.
“Can you imagine seeing that thing on ayahuasca?” Chuck asks. “That’d be the last thing you’d see. Have you seen that clip on the internet where they cut the guy out of the snake?”
“No fucking way.”
“Yeah, look at it. They cut it open and pull the guy out, and he’s semi-digested. Google it. Maybe something like anaconda eats man,” he laughs. “They say they’ll get you on the river when you bend down and look like a big piece of meat, like an offering to them, kind of a shaking meatball. They’re not real fast, so when you come across one in the forest they jump on you. Imagine the force of hundreds of pounds of movement! Ay yai ya yai!”
It’s a short but very pleasant ride across the river to the government sponsored village of Padre Cocha, where the boat docks down by the muddy shoreline. A criss-cross network of wooden planks and gangplanks connect the collectivos to the shore and then well-worn pathways thread up through the green hills, past washing hung out to dry in patches on the green grass, to the village up above.
The people here allowed the government to build them concrete homes a few years back when the authorities were trying to upgrade the primitive bamboo huts and malocas they lived in. But then the government had the nerve to charge the locals rent. “It’s our land,” the Indians said. “Take back your walls!”—and it’s been a standoff ever since.
It’s pretty mellow on the streets, though. A paved footpath takes us through a charming walk and as we pass along the whole village streams to and fro, going about their daily life. Women with plastic buckets balance fruit in them on top of their heads as they walk along. Kids fish in local ponds off the bridge and play soccer on open fields between the houses. Afternoon clouds part on the horizon with brilliant rays of light streaming down—it’s biblical. This is the Promised Land, the vision sighs, even if it is a semi-urban redevelopment on a tributary of the Amazon.
After a twenty minute walk we arrive at Quahrade Amore—Love Creek, a small, muddy trickle in the jungle. The creek bed itself is only about five meters wide and a meter deep, although it’s almost empty now with only a thin sluice of muddy water reflecting the canopy of the trees and the sky. Despite the fact that the water has almost completely dried up, the creek bed itself isn’t dry, but a rich moist mud nurtured by the surrounding rainforest.
The area around the creek has been thinned and cultivated and there’s three wooden benches spread out every twenty meters or so like a picnic area. A small log bridge crosses the creek and connects with a clearing on the far bank where there’s an open-air hut twelve feet across with a single hammock in the middle of it, and a wooden desk on the other side. The floor is covered with plastic bags, gumboots, flip-flops, and various other miscellaneous goods. A large family is huddled under it like contestants in a reality TV challenge to squeeze as many indigenous Indians as possible under such a tiny roof.
Rider, the wiry fiftyish head of the family steps forward to greet Javier and shake our hands. He’s bare-chested, dressed in black sports shorts with a red stripe, black gumboots, and a brown baseball cap. Chuck says something in Spanish and presents the shiny new machete to him with a smile. He takes it carefully and inspects it top to bottom, thanking Chuck profusely as he slices at a nearby vine.
Behind him stands Juan, Rider’s elderly father, who with his graying moustache and neat slicked hair is a dead ringer for a Peruvian Clark Gable. Next to him is his wife, a round-faced woman with an air of resignation about her; a woman in her twenties with wide eyes and an even wider smile; two older teenage boys; three younger lads; two young girls; and some babies.
Like virtually all the indigenous villagers throughout Peru they’re dressed in cast-off Western brand logo clothes, including faded Quicksilver surf t-shirts and imitation GAP pants. They smile and say hello and somehow accommodate us in this tiny space and Rider’s wife sweeps the dusty floorboards for us as the family makes us welcome. We sit down and get comfortable, taking off our hiking boots and soaking up the energy of the place.
After a while Chuck rolls some maryjane—Western plant medicine—and the family take a great interest in the plant, the dozen of them leaning in and asking questions about its properties and the spirit involved. Cannabis has been used for over 5,000 years as an oil, a food, a drug, a medicine, and a fiber, Chuck explains patiently to the family. Javier laughs and says he likes to use toé in his brews, but marijuana is also a powerful ally.
Javier goes over and gathers his dried datura leaves, wrapped in newspaper, for us to have a look. Toé is like an elegant and beautiful 1920s socialite—in the West this white lily goes under the names datura, Jimson Weed, or Deadly Nightshade. You mix the dry white lilies in with the vine and it induces a rushing hallucinogenic effect when you drink it, Javier explains, rubbing his hands over his belly to pantomime the waves of energy that toé releases. You can also dry it and roll up the leaves to smoke, which can coax you to sleep while taking you on extreme spirit journeys, Javier explains with a smile.
As Chuck and I share the joint and sit back the magic of Peru unfolds in the late afternoon light around us. “This place is just so beautiful,” Chuck says after a while, looking over at me with heavy, stoned eyes. “I used to do a lot of drugs, back in my younger days,” he admits, “but now it’s just ayahuasca and marijuana, the plant sacraments, yeah.”
After a while Juan, the grandfather, wants to show us something and calls us over to a nearby bench. Languidly we get up and go over to see him holding a magic stone about the size of a football. He found it some years ago in the creek bed here at Quahrade Amore, Chuck translates for us. They’re very rare in these parts because the Amazon is full of sedimentary sand and when they find a stone like this it’s considered extremely fortuitous. Chuck picks it up and devours it with his eyes, mesmerized by the smooth weight and power of it.
“Rak… I’m not a paleontologist, but this looks like a fossil of some kind. Look right there,” he says excitedly, pointing to a rippling indent on one side of the stone. “Doesn’t that look like fins?”
Chuck’s entranced, squinting through a pocket magnifying glass at the upper rim of the stone, then holding it up carefully for my inspection. It looks like a stone heart carved from a mountain, with two protuberances along one side like eyes, or the stubs of stems where the valves connect to the arteries.
“El bocca,” Rider says, turning it over to see a row of imprints in the stone like gums without teeth. He cups it in both hands and blows mapacho smoke over it, cleansing and blessing it from top to bottom. It called out to him to find it, Rider says, just as one of the plant doctors would.
The earth speaks, you see, but it doesn’t speak in words: it speaks in energy. And that energy manifests in the species that live on the skin of the world as the Gaian collective. Millions of years ago we lived in caves, womb-like, enveloped by the energy of the stones, and the memory of their voice is still deep within us.
I’ve been so preoccupied learning about ayahuasca and the plants here in the jungles that I must admit I haven’t paid much attention to the stones. There was a stone healer at the conference who brought with him an array of piedras, as they call them here, that he used in his own practice in Iquitos. Encantos are special healing stones used by the shamans, I remember him saying.
Despite the rarity of stones in the Amazon, their magic is recognized and respected as an extension of the way the plants work. Amazonian curanderos believe that the harder the wood of a tree the more power it contains, and so too, the stones have an even more powerful nature inherent in them, if only one can access it.
Not all stones are magic, Juan explains, but you can tell from the shape of the stone, and how it molds to the body what type of power it contains and its healing properties. Different colors also signify varying potentials. White stones (yura encantos) made from hard marble, are considered the most powerful, purifying and cleansing the body. Because they can be recharged over and over they also provide an arcana-type protection to the recipient. Black stones help repel negativity of any brujeria, red encantos help nourish the blood, green encantos are linked closely with the plants, brown encantos speak for the earth. Crystals give a clear vision and connect to heavenly realms.
As with the plants, stones can be used in a variety of ways to connect and divine. One way is to leave them in water overnight to let their essence seep in, blowing mapacho smoke over them for cleansing. The intent of the user and the need for healing is focused on as you drink the mineralized water the next day, and the power of the stones enters you. Or stones can be laid on top of a patient, their power healing specific blockages directly.
The power of the stones is old and deep, even older than the plants, ultimately. But once you establish a relationship with the stones, the encantos, it is said that they can come to you in your dreams and reveal their wisdom.
To entertain the newfound audience a four-year-old boy in a grubby Fantastic Four t-shirt shows off his remarkable singing ability, launching into a light trance state as he begins an enchanted song, a tribal story from long ago. He’s some natural jungle savant, getting into an autopoetic groove, the notes of his song falling one after the other after the other in an enchanted melody. Time slows and then stops almost to a standstill, that golden moment of the afternoon when the light captures us all just so.
“Gracias,” the boy finishes and instantly the whole frozen tableau breaks and people spring into action; the spell is lost.
Javier sets up string hammocks under the trees and as the sun sets the mosquitos rise in a wave of expectant bloodletting. I fall into a hammock, letting the Gaian web catch and enfold me back into its embrace, preparing for launch. One of the sons gets the wheelbarrow and lifts the young singer into it and speeds him on a ride around the clearing, down past the trees to the creek. The mom keeps sweeping the floorboards as if nothing has happened, and Chuck turns towards me and says, “Encanto,” and smiles.
I can feel it beginning again; in truth, it never ends…
***
Tonight Javier’s dressed in a traditional ankle-length Shipibo gown with rose patterns on it, the mark of a vegetalista. It looks unerringly like the faded 1950s dress my grandmother used to wear when she went shopping up the street—except for the baby monkey skull hanging on a bead necklace and the red bead headband crowning his head. It’s the feminine again, the holy archetype, la madre sagrade. He sits on an old log surrounded by plastic bottles of aguadiente and ayahuasca all marked out in the light before him, Western castoffs holding the holy sacrament.
Javier holds up his shacapa fan, rattling it as he soplars the area, a long and thick mapacho burned down to the stub and hanging from his lips. He’s singing Shipibo-style icaros which undulate with a sweet, slow tumbleweed roll, and it’s then that I remember he was Percy’s teacher for a time—that’s where I’ve heard these tunes before, back on my first journey into the mystery…
“Salud,” Javier says, holding up a little wooden bowl full of ayahuasca and handing it to Chuck.
“Oh ho hi-o,” Chuck grumbles, and burps. One by one we go up to Javier as he smiles at us and reveals his Buddha nature, letting us sip from the holy cup.
Whhhiiissssss…
Whhhiiissssss…
Whhhiiissssss…
The sound of his shacapa is like rainfall beating on the roof of me. Whhhiiissssss… whhhiiissssss… whhhiiissssss… whhhiiissssss… I’m going down, down the whirlpool, into the beat, a deep trance state as Javier hits his stride, soplaring and cleansing, never-ending, riding the sound into the atomic sea… Whhhiiissssss… whhhiiissssss… whhhiiissssss… whhhiiissssss…
His music comes alive revealing subtle, infinite vibrational patterns, cascading beats and whirrs and clicks counterpointing the constant rain of the shacapa. The surround-sound effect is back again, spatio-distortion, and I have to focus. I know Javier’s there in front of me but I can hear him singing as clear as day ninety degrees around from me. I’d swear he’s walking round us but he doesn’t move from his spot as the icaros pour through him like a waterfall.
Beside me, Chuck’s lying on a blanket on the ground as he’s carried off into the dream. He’s opening his eyes and closing his eyes but there’s no difference in the visions invading his skull, he tells me later. The two health workers on the other side of Chuck are very quiet, all of us carried away by the force of the vine. I’m rolled up in a cocoon, going in, melting into a familiar sea of archetypes as my subconscious rises up to greet the ayahuasca. Chuck’s the Lone Ranger, Javier’s Tonto, of course, and I’m the Thunderbolt Kid. I’m melting into the heavenly archetypes as the world unfolds and the Love Creek Session starts getting heavy…
The chik-chik-chik-chik of the shacapa becomes everything. The rattle is the sound of the cosmic heartbeat, the sacred mother nurturing us all. Later, bathed in Javier’s sweet, sweet icaros, I can feel the hologrammatic intelligence bleeding through: I can feel our energy fields feeding the web around us, the insects, the plants, the stones, the earth. All of us intersecting, rippling wave forms of becoming lapping up against each other.
Javier comes round to blow mapacho smoke over our crowns and down our backs, cleansing us. I’m fully in oceanic bliss, deep in the ayahuasca space. All of a sudden there’s a jolt of electricity, a thunderbolt from my third eye like living lightning. Ahhhhhh. I’ve arrived.
I look up through a diamond pattern to see Javier standing there in his spirit doctor form, performing surgery. A galactic homeopathic burst of the medicine hits me… I feel like I’m in an astral doctor’s office and he’s looking over my light body for blockages or problems. So by the way, I’ve got this thing in my leg, y’know? I’ve got this pain in my ankle that hurts a little bit, I communicate telepathically. Could you take a look?
This is a different type of hallucination than other ayahuasca visions I’ve experienced—this time I can feel the images I’m seeing having a direct effect on me, like interactive virtual reality, tele-medicine for the soul. The spirit isn’t just wavering about outside of me—it’s in me, spiraling down the tunnel of my flesh. And voom! The energy goes right there, the light of the psychic stethoscope travels down to my ankle as the spirit doctor starts examining it as real as you please.
My ankle is bathed in a warm light which hovers there for a few minutes, then suddenly my whole leg spasms and a small dark snake rises up from my ankle, away from the light. I can see it slithering on the dirt by Javier’s feet before shooting out into the night. Fuck. Me. I guess I was sicker than I thought.
My woes go deeper than the flesh, though. What I really want, more than anything, is to merge with the DMT-ayahuasca space, to create some permanent but controllable bridge with the freedom to move between it and the baseline reality. To prove to myself this is possible and that I’m not really going mad, drifting into unconscious ego traps. The last time I entertained this idea back at that first ceremony at Juan’s house, the ayahuasca space was too strong, too hyperdimensionally powerful to contain and remain myself.
But I know we all have this potential within us, that’s what “Christ” or “Cosmic” consciousness is all about, connecting to the Divine and remembering it within us. Feeding the activated light body that had been switched on in Iquitos. Curanderos diet to cleanse their energy fields to be more receptive to the Great Spirit that enters them, but it’s a connection we can all share to whatever degree we choose to accept and work with it.
My vision shifts as the ayahuasca brings up images from my data banks again; it’s reading my vocabulary and talking to me in my own symbol-language. A parade of archetypes flows past me and suddenly there’s Jesus, my big brother and friend, surrounded by happy Hebrew villagers. It looks like a picture right out of the children’s Bible of my youth, but it’s more likely triggered by my visit to the Plaza Matriz yesterday.
Jesus smiles at me and it’s like basking in the sun, but on the inside. He reaches into his white robe and holds something out: a bleeding heart surrounded by a coruscating aura of white light. I eagerly reach out to touch it but it changes and morphs into the shape of the stone heart that Javier had shown us earlier, pulsing with an inner life. Jesus brings the stone up to his mouth and blows on it and the stone heart sings its icaro, a haunting underwater-jukebox melody, and the vibrational signature enters my crown chakra and spirals down my head and into my chest, to my own heart.
As the stone energy courses through I can feel the ecstatic frequency of the planetary grid, the collective consciousness of the stones under the plants. The topography of the invisible landscape reveals itself and I can feel everything moving at different vibrational frequencies even though we’re all still. I can see energy moving through the flesh of our bodies, our vibrational wavefronts interweaving with the atomic curtain.
Most of all, I can feel the power of this magic stone flooding into me, its special arcana entering me, tuning me into the deep, slow wavelength of silicon consciousness. This is how the stone “sees,” I realize.
And then I’m floating in the sea of vibration again, reading the wave we’re all made up of. It feels like my brain is filtering and drinking in the prime frequency. It’s pure hologrammatic intelligence, awareness of the universal hologram we are embedded in and made manifest.
All of us are energy fields that collectively build the hologram—we are IT, the IT I couldn’t grasp on that first DMT journey at Ron Wheelock’s house, the IT of the cosmic overmind: the humans, the beasts, the insects, the plants, the stones, the earth. All of us energy fields, intersecting, intelligent, rippling waves of vibration becoming at all times, each action and thought setting off new waves that affect and change the hologrammatic whole.
The stone has unlocked the knowledge I hid down in my heart that first time I had my deep ayahuasca breakthrough at don Juan’s, the awe-ful, raging certainty of the cosmic ecology. What a terrible truth, this naked force of creation, within us all this time.
Why me, I wonder, as waves of Godhead flood in, unlocked by this key-stone. Jesus, what a cross to bear.
Excerpted from Aya Awakenings: A Shamanic Odyssey by Rak Razam. Reprinted by permission of publisher..
Rak Razam is the world’s leading ‘experiential’ journalist, writing about and helping shape the emergence of a new cultural paradigm in the 21st century.
Author of the critically acclaimed book Aya Awakenings: A Shamanic Odyssey and the companion volume of interviews,The Ayahuasca Sessions (www.ayathe-book.com), he is a frequent lecturer on ayahuasca and the shamanic revival sweeping the West. He wrote, produced and co-directed the groundbreaking new visionary documentary Aya: Awakenings (www.aya-awakenings.com) that toured across 10 cities in the USA in early 2014. He has been hosting dynamic speaking engagements, panel facilitation and lectures across Australia and North America at conferences, transformational festivals and other events for the past five years, weaving together the New Age, counter-culture and progressive thought. A prolific media maker and networker, he hosts a popular podcast show In a Perfect World (http://in-a-perfect-world.podomatic.com).
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