I’m beginning to wonder about the health benefits of flaying your mind to near death every night. Last nights ceremony began as usual, and after 40 minutes I felt myself ‘going under’. Quickly the mood went strange. The Icaros sounded unfamiliar and I found myself embracing insanity. That is, I went insane. I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t exist, I was everything and nothing. It was my worst nightmare of what happens when you die, you just go into the cosmic soup of things and cease to exist, and have never actually existed outside of your own mind and ego. Then the message began to come to me, that I had to embrace total insanity, in order to see clarity. I had to cease to exist in order to understand that in fact I am a part of everything. That when I die I do indeed go into the cosmic soup, and while my soul exists, and my spiritual advancement from this life exists, the person I thought I was doesn’t. The fact that I don’t really like onions, but I like ice cream has never existed. All I am is a bunch of particles. I was deep inside the Ayahuasca and I didn’t notice anyone around me, but I understand I was puking a bit. This I can say for sure was the most frightening moment of my life. I understood at this time the priorities of my existence, and I also understood that I’d gone insane, and I wasn’t sure at this time if I had lost it permanently. I embraced this insanity, this total chaos and non-existence of my self.
I began to change into a wolf., I was being possessed. I felt my left arm joint changing to that of the front leg of a wolf, with the paw, pads and claws. I was being taken over and I was scared, so I tried to fight. I then began to change into an insect, with my arms becoming a kind of curved mandible with grooves on the inside. I puked my guts up. I sounded like a
great worm from the planet Dune, choking out this black poison. The bucket was full of these manky weeds and dead plants, and death and decay was all around me. I understand now that this idea really means that we are connected to everything in the world, and it is entirely possible to actually ‘become’ an animal under the influence of Ayahuasca. This doesn’t just mean your imagination, there is something more, you think like the animal, behave and move and act like the animal, even though you have no idea what you are doing. I have a pretty good imagination but this was totally left field for me, and I am now convinced there is something about this, I didn’t think I’d find myself saying this but you actually become possessed by the animal spirit. I can’t think of any other rational explanation. After some time and some heavy puking, the vision faded and I lapsed into a morose exhaustion along with some sweating. About midnight it wore off and I felt good enough to go to bed. I slept soundly, along with some crazy dreams.
I didn’t enjoy it this time at all, I’m trying to understand things rationally here – I understand that Ayhuasca releases the serotonin or something similar which gives you the feeling of a near death experience, so that can explain why I went insane and lost all sense of my self – this is what happens when a soul leaves the body and therefore leaves the world of physical sensation.
Today is a break from the Ayahuasca, so I will get both lunch and dinner – when we have a ceremony we don’t get dinner, so I’ve been living on one meagre meal a day plus this Godawful breakfast, I’m pretty exhausted. Today at a nearby lake swimming, and life seems perfectly (and spookily) normal again. It turns out the girl I thought had cancer actually doesn’t have cancer, she just has a shaved head, I guess she’s a Lesbian. She’s a pretty friendly girl, who happens to like a lot of blankets.
At 5pm we took the 4th and last ‘shamanic diet’ drink which is supposed to let the tree spirits live in me and keep me healthy. It was in the ceremony house. Even going in there gives me the creeps after last night. The whole set up is like a horror movie. Calm and friendly by day, but a scene of total heart stopping horror for 5 hours at night. I’m not looking forward to the 3rd session at all, and I’m looking forward to this being over.
It rained heavily all day, and there were some flooded areas in the camp. The time dragged on before the ceremony. Everyone was a little bit nervous.
The ceremony, however, ended up quite different from the previous nights in the asylum. I didn’t have any strong visions. Maybe the medicine thought I’d learned the lesson and understood the last message sufficiently to move on. The night was reasonably boring, with the odd nugget of wisdom and clarity making some part of the previous session clear. The wolf came again and I made friends with him, and now I understood he was here to help protect me from evil spirits. He slept beside me in my bed afterwards(am I really writing this?!!)
The noises in there would make anyone sick. Ayahuasca puking is not like normal puking. It’s always loud, not much actually comes up, but there is a lot of energy used in the process. Some guy is make a gobbling noise like a turkey, some guys are even stranger and more sinister, like a noise that an Orc would make choking to death.
One of the guys has begun to orgasm in the ceremony. The Icaros plainly hit a raw nerve and he was shuddering and shaking and making all sorts of brrrrs and uuugh. It was contagious, and really spread around. Afterwards I saw him, he’d walked into the jungle with his torch and was puking like crazy, whooping and oohin and ahhing, a full two hours afterwards. He was really enjoying himself. Next day he said he was going on fire, and met some really wise spirits who were opening up whole new things to him. This was his 2nd or 3rd time.
I’m still not sure, is it a medicine that allows the spirits to enter you and purge you until you see total clarity and enter heaven? Or is it simply a hallucinogenic drug that allows your subconscious mind to tell your conscious mind what it ‘needs to know’. The ‘purges’ (pukes, shits, shakes, sweats) are strange – you feel good afterwards, definitely like you got rid of something bad in your system, ‘some bad energy is leaving you’ is what they say, and it clears the path to enlightenment, but whatever… I suppose that’s like some kind of psychic church confessional (not that I’ve ever been to one).
I slept much of the day and missed breakfast. I will eat lunch as it’s the only meal today. It’s this horrible bony fish like something only Gollum would touch. Rice, and a disgusting baked plantain which looks like a banana but tastes like a bad cigar. Today again went slowly, and I was tired, especially since the Ayahuasca kept me awake most of the night.
The Ayahuasca on this night tasted so bad that I was almost sick straight away. I think my body knows to reject it since I’ve vomited and had diarrhoea so much with it. Luckily Justin, two along from me, had a local hand rolled cigarette – just a puff or two takes the taste away.
The nights experience was a more pleasant event all around, just sitting in a good space for 3 hours, a little like the first ceremony. I guess the medicine was working on me and consolidating the previous night in my head. Some guys were getting noisy again but in a good way. Mr Psychic Orgasm was at it again, albeit more quietly, and Mr Chicken was having his own personal farmyard party.
It keeps giving me this electric shock when I try to sleep, to keep me awake to pour the wisdom in, by the time I was able to doze I was exhausted, it was 5am and becoming light again.
This final night of Ayahuasca, I was quite relaxed. This night was mixed. I puked a bit, but had a glimpse of heaven. I saw with total clarity, and could answer every question I had with total logic and reason, my head was totally clear. This I suppose is the beginning of the next level of wisdom. There were a lot of things here that I can’t put into words (at least not now) and I know the Ayahuasca is still working on me, even 3 months later The main messages, that everyone has love in them, about priorities in life, about what really happens when you die, that everything is love, in some manifestation or another, that our whole lives are actually all in our mind and our daily lives are a simple construct of our minds, about the reason for being here, which are truly profound and interesting. That final night I stayed in the ceremonial house, and let all the knowledge flow
through me. It gave me a good hint that much better things were to come.
At 6am I was due to end the Shamanic diet. I’d managed to stop shitting and doze off about 5am, at 5.40am we couldn’t wait any longer and went up to the food house to take some salt. We each got a tablespoonful to put in our mouths, washed it around with water and spat what was left out after a minute or so. It was my first salt for a week, it felt great!
The hardest part now would be to join the real world again. Driving back to Iquitos, it was quite depressing, like we’d attended the best party in the universe, and now we realised that no one else had been there.
Alan Findlay was born in South Africa, grew up in Glasgow, and after a long stint in London, he now lives in Talllinn Estonia for most of the year. An ex Stockbroker, gambler and businessman, boredom often takes him to dark corners of the world where he writes whatever comes into his mind at the time.
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