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DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY
FIELDWORK REPORTS 1 & 2
PERUVIAN
‘THE REALM
OF VISIONS’: TOWARDS AN EVALUATION OF THE ROLE OF NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE IN
AYAHUASCA PSYCHOTHERAPIES.
Marcus C.Y. Lumby
PART TWO
23rd March – 9th May 1998
INTRODUCTION.
Exactly three months after returning to
FIELDWORK OBJECTIVES.
During my first period of preliminary fieldwork
I had undertaken a six week introductory Ayahuasca diet at ‘La Sachamama’-
an ethnobotanical garden located in the Amazon forest 20 km outside
the city of Iquitos where I will conduct the formal fieldwork for my Ph.D.
research project (‘An Evaluation of the Role of Near-Death Experience in Ayahuasca
Psychotherapies’). The diet had involved my taking Ayahusaca twelve times
so I brought to the second period a reasonably extensive experiential knowledge
of the intrapsychic effects of Ayahuasca intoxication. However, I was conscious
of the fact that all twelve of these ceremonial ingestions had been undertaken
in a single location and each under the auspices of the same Ayahuasquero
shaman. While this was inevitable given the nature of the diet I had since
recognised the need to build a body of comparative experiences which would
enable me, from a personal perspective, to assess the affective influences
of ‘set and setting’ in the ritual use of Ayahuasca. At the subjective level
I wanted to re-engage with the near-death aspects of Ayahuasca hallucinosis
in the hopes that I might achieve more completely than I did during the La
Sachamama diet an affective/experiential realisation of the ‘death process’
itself. I had come to suspect that the more completely one affectively dies
under the influences of Ayahuasca, and the closer one comes as a consequence
to the ecstatic core of the experience the more profound must be the insights
and marked the associated attitude changes. While my circumstantial experience
of near-death phenomena would support this supposition it remained for me
to verify personally an affective/experiential equivalence in the hallucinatory
contexts of Ayahuasca intoxication. More generally, a period of study at Takiwasi
would also enable me to experience firsthand some of the traditional medicine-derived
drug rehabilitation protocols currently being implemented and to examine the
function of any near-death components in these. Notwithstanding the fact that
as a consequence of the Ayahuasca diet at La Sachamama I was now in a position
to formulate more specific research objectives for this second period of fieldwork
I was aware that they could still only be provisional and might have to be
adapted according to circumstances.
TAKIWASI, ‘HOUSE OF MUSIC’.
I arrived at the Takiwasi Centre in Tarapoto on
the morning of March 26th. After a round of introductions I was invited by
Jaques Mabit to begin my studies by participating in a ‘Rosa Sisa’ plant purge
scheduled for that afternoon. At
During the first month of a patient’s residence
at Takiwasi the treatment emphasises ‘physical purification’- a cleansing
of the body of the lingering toxic traces of addiction. This cleansing is
effected principally through such plant-induced purges (Rosa Sisa, Yawapanga,
etc.). These procedures are seen to prepare the patient physically for the
next stage of treatment- the psychological/affective/emotional level where
the individual is guided towards the achievement of ‘connection’ with ‘family,
emotions, memories, sadness, and their location in the context of humanity’
(from ‘Interview with the Founder of the Takiwasi Centre’, www.csp.org/nicholas/A33.html).
The primary means of inducing such a connection and contextualisation
(see ‘Fieldwork Report for Prelminary Period One’, above) is the ritual ingestion
of Ayahuasca.
AYAHUASCA THERAPY AT TAKIWASI (An Experiential
Perspective).
At Takiwasi Ayahuasca ceremonies are conducted
twice a week (Tuesdays and Fridays) in a purpose-built malocca longhouse
a little removed from the central complex. Therapeutically they are the source
of the insights which effect the attitudinal alterations around which a patient’s
re-adaptive personality configuration is orientated.
On the evening following my arrival I was invited
to participate in my first ceremony. As at La Sachamama the ceremony was scheduled
to begin at
After the relative freedom of the ceremonies at
La Sachamama I was rather disconcerted by the apparent stringency of the Takiwasi
approach. I rarely spoke during the ceremonies at La Sachamama but the fact
that I was free to do so meant that I was not conscious of any constraint
in this regard. The freedom to smoke meant that there was no threat of the
Ayahuasca experiences being complicated by frustrated desire! ‘Lying down’
was not forbidden at La Sachamama, it was merely suggested that staying upright
inhibited sleep and the potential ‘conscious loss’ of important insights or
visions. The prohibition on leaving the malocca at Takiwasi also induced a
sense of uncomfortable constraint as at certain points in each of the twelve
ceremonies I participated in at La Sachamama the need to leave the confines
of the Ayahuasca temple and be alone in and with the forest had proved irresistible.
Notwithstanding these reservations I could both understand and respect the
principal rules of ceremonial conduct at Takiwasi given the location and design
of the malocca and the number of participants involved. What I failed to reconcile
with my knowledge of the dynamics of Ayahuasca ceremonies was Jaques’ suggestion
that we should remain in our own private cells of experience. The often
dramatic re-definition of the boundaries of ‘self’ coupled with an inescapable
and I believe essential ‘group dynamic’ that I had come to expect from the
ritual ingestion of Ayahuasca seemed to preclude the possibility of such an
overtly stipulated ‘isolation’. From a personal point of view these restrictions
and irreconcilable stipulations conspired to induce in me a feeling akin to
claustrophobia- a far from auspicious ‘set’ in a less than conducive ‘setting’.
The experiential content of the twelve Ayahuasca
ceremonies I participated in at La Sachamama had been predominantly of a ‘transpersonal’
nature. While ‘biographical’ material proved an important and ever-present
concomitant of this perspective it had definitely been secondary. The affective-philosophical
focus of these first experiences had centred on matters of universal
significance, and particularly those pertaining to meaning. Personal
‘contextualisation’ had been achieved with minimal difficulty and this had
enabled me to gain almost instant access to the mystical dimensions
of Ayahuasca experience, those that lie beyond the resolution of a personal
encounter with the reality of death, and the establishment of an affectively
meaningful/explanatory relation between ‘self’ and ‘the totality of all that
is’ (Bohm, D. 1980:55).
In striking contrast to this the experiential
content of my first ceremony at Takiwasi constituted an agonising return to
the most traumatic periods of my childhood and early adult life. These were
summoned into the forefront of my conscious experience in unprecedented imaginal
and affective detail, and these effects- deliberately accentuated by my drinking
a second cup of Ayahuasca after a couple of hours- plunged me inexorably into
the deepest hells of myself. I had been quite unprepared for such a perspective
but, and in spite of the intense emotional pain, I felt that a negotiation
of these aspects of experience was essential if they were to be ‘accepted’,
‘assimilated’, and ultimately ‘transcended’. Notwithstanding Jaques’ preliminary
stipulations about confining myself to my own experiences I couldn’t help
but notice one of the other participants (a member of staff) who had moved
to the centre of the circle and sobbed in a manner suggesting that he too
was in great pain. Indeed, I imagined that this is how one might react had
the subjectively worst thing in the world just happened. This imagining led
me to speculate about what would induce me to cry in such a manner- an undertaking
which did little to elevate my mood. The atmosphere was indescribably oppressive
and charged with a physically chilling negativity. I envisaged and
affectively experienced the pains of the various participants being pooled
into a largely uncontrolled collective field of psychic cross-infection.
While I recognise the psychotherapeutic value
of having no choice but to confront one’s fears such regressional re-animations
of trauma under the influences of Ayahuasca may be as affectively devastating
as the actuality to which they pertain. At no stage in the ceremony did the
liberating/transcending possibility of an affective death present itself
and I was thus constrained to linger in a limbo of unresolvable pain and fear-
fear of the pain and its implications with regard to some of my deepest emotional
foundations.
The ceremony ended at
As I walked back to my lodging through the empty
streets of Tarapoto I felt thoroughly disintegrated. The sense of experiential
‘closure’ I had grown accustomed to feeling at the end of each of the Ayahuasca
ceremonies at La Sachamama was completely absent. I slept fitfully, haunted
by the experiences of the Takiwasi ceremony which had now become the stuff
of dismal dreams. I awoke the next morning in the grip of an intense anxiety
which threatened to establish itself as a depression. Not wishing to allow
this to happen I decided to return to Takiwasi in order to discuss the ceremony
with my fellow participants. I thought it best to confine my investigations
to the experiences of the students and members of staff who had participated
as it would have been irresponsible to influence the patients in any way.
The first person I spoke to (a student like myself)
claimed to have had a series of similarly unpleasant experiences, so much
so in fact that this individual was now disinclined to participate in any
further Ayahuasca ceremonies at Takiwasi. Conscious that some ceremonies are
bound to be more ‘difficult’ than others I decided to extend my inquiries
to the experiences of those individuals who had participated in several ceremonies
over an appreciable period of time- long-term members of the Takiwasi staff.
One of these informants told me that they had been working at Takiwasi for
six months but had been unable to bring themselves to participate in Ayahuasca
ceremonies for the past three. They had come to Takiwasi seeking the sorts
of mystical transcendence I reported for La Sachamama but had found only ‘biographical
agony’. Another was still experiencing a depression that had apparently
been induced during a ceremony conducted in the previous week.
While this was admittedly a very small sample
it was sufficient to suggest that the negativity of my personal experiences
the night before was not solely due to some sort of individual ‘phase’ with
regard to Ayahuasca. I discussed this with Jaques and he suggested that the
biographical pain patients experienced constituted a crucial stage in their
evolution towards personal psychological health and in their preparation for
access to Ayahuasca’s transpersonal dimensions. This I fully accepted but
wondered whether a little more balance might ease the transition. My
experiences at La Sachamama had brought me affectively to the edge of insanity,
the heart of Hell, and the brink of death but they had never left me feeling
quite so enduringly devastated as had my first ceremony at Takiwasi. However,
it would have been premature for me to finalise an opinion on the basis of
this and so I resolved to drink again on the following Tuesday.
After three days of struggling to piece myself
back together in the wake of my first ceremony I attended my second. I was
prepared for another night of ‘biographical agony’ and so decided to confine
myself to a single measure of Ayahuasca in the hopes that this might tone
down the emotional intensity of the experience. As anticipated the biographical
focus of the second ceremony was as marked as the first. This enabled me to
return to certain areas of particular conflict and address them with a degree
of objective detachment not possible during the first ceremony because of
my disorientation and excessively intense affective involvement. At the close
of the ceremony I felt marginally more coherent in myself again but
I was subsequently to feel a deep, self-preservational reluctance to participate
in any further ceremonies at Takiwasi.
TAKIWASI’S ‘DIETARY RETREATS’.
By good fortune my period of study at Takiwasi
just happened to present me with the opportunity to participate in one of
the tri- ennial ‘dietary retreats’ organised by the Centre and conducted in
the mountains about an hour’s walk from Tarapoto. The next diet was scheduled
to begin on the Friday following my second Ayahuasca ceremony and Jaques agreed
that my participation would provide me with invaluable insights into Takiwasi’s
rehabilitatory programme. After careful consideration, and with particular
reference to my experiences of ‘fear’ in the context of the two preceding
Ayahuasca ceremonies, he recommended ‘Chiric Sanango’ (Rauwolfia duckei)
as the plant preparation most appropriate to my needs.
According to Jaques these forest retreats constitute
the most important dynamic in the Takiwasi treatment of drug addiction. A
diet involves the patient being sequestered in a small tambo hut for
a period of eight days during which time they may subsist on plain rice gruel
or, depending upon personal inclination, nothing at all except for ‘raw’ river
water and the relevant plant preparation. Human contact is kept to an absolute
minimum and the emphasis is on deep reflection and ‘confrontation with self’.
There are 32 Plantas Maestras (‘Plant Teachers’) currently in use for
these diets and they may be administered on their own or in a variety of combinations
depending on the specific effects required.
THE ‘CHIRIC SANANGO’ DIET (An Experiential Perspective).
On the Friday after my second Ayahuasca ceremony
I left the Takiwasi compound in a party of fifteen people- ten patients and
five staff/researchers including myself. As I walked away from Tarapoto and
up into the mountains I was still experiencing a distinctly depressed frame
of mind as a consequence of the build up of ‘negative energies’ during the
Ayahuasca ceremonies. However, I felt confident that the diet would effect
an experience of sufficient intensity to extricate me from my suddenly downcast
frame of mind. The attendant anxiety had been significantly increased by my
discovering that the diet would be inaugurated with an Ayahuasca ceremony
in a new malocca built specifically for the purpose near the site of the diet
tambos. I consoled myself with the notion that this malocca would probably
be ‘pristine’, no ceremonies having been conducted there yet and it was therefore
unlikely to present such a psychically hostile environment as the much-used
Takiwasi malocca in Tarapoto.
After and hour’s walk, mostly upwards, we arrived
at the diet chacra (‘garden’) and were each allocated a personal tambo
in which we would reside for the duration of the diet. I was subsequently
guided to tambo ‘COCA’ by one of the chacra’s guardians.
Tambo ‘COCA’ was a rudimentary, if picturesque,
hut with two open sides and a palm-thatched roof. Inside there was a bed platform
raised above an earth floor pocked liberally with ant-lion craters. Immediately,
I hung up a brightly coloured hammock and a mosquito net in an attempt to
make things feel a little more ‘homely’.
The inaugural Ayahuasca ceremony in the new malocca
was scheduled to begin at
My experiences during this ceremony were less
affectively devastating than the previous two but I was still conscious of
being perilously exposed to some far from benign ‘psychic’ influences. Most
notable for me was the fact that the ceremony was completely devoid of visions
(my teachers in
I was awakened at dawn by a knock on the side
of my hut and an individual named
Prior to the diet I had been informed by Jaques
that in addition to these dramatic physical effects Chiric Sanango produces
intensely vivid dreams in the sleeping mind, and in the waking it induces
a ‘cleansing’ of negative contents pertaining to the drinker’s past experience,
and a state of deep reflection on matters pertaining to the future. The negative
accretions of the past are cleaned away from the ‘lens’ of the present in
order that a clear and undistorted vision of the future may be attained. This
transformation is effected in the experiential context of Chiric Sanango’s
‘cold-fear-death’ psychophysical matrix.
Given the frame of mind established as a consequence
of my three most recent Ayahuasca experiences I was already well placed for
a reflexive assessment of the ‘negative contents’ of my own past. With these
firmly in the forefront of my consciousness the dominant mood of the first
twenty-four hours of the diet was one of intense separation anxiety. This
articulated itself in the form of a profound sense of ‘homesickness’ which
at times filled me with an almost irresistible compulsion to capitulate. My
mind presented me with a series of elaborate ‘persuasions’ not least of which
being the suggestion that ‘I must be crazy to subject myself voluntarily to
this degree of physical discomfort and psychological pain’. However, the future
extrapolated from the point of imagined capitulation was so fraught with negative
implications that I was constrained to continue with the diet, tapping into
a hitherto obscured level of personal resilience. I was obsessively focused
on the passage of time and the more I ‘obsessed’ the slower it seemed to pass
until the period of the diet suggested an insurmountable eternity. By the
end of the first day, as the physical effects of the Chiric Sanango wore off,
I felt utterly dejected, desperately alone, and thoroughly miserable. An awareness
of ‘self-pity’ accentuated the emotional discomfort and I endeavoured to put
things into perspective by reminding myself of the unimaginable suffering
of, for example, concentration camp prisoners. This provided me with a firm
hold above the abyss of despair I imagined gaping beneath me.
For the first four days of the diet I hung on
to this, as though for my life, with my waking and sleeping consciousness
gradually blending together until I came to exist in a perpetual state of
quasi-hypnagogy. Only intensifying hunger and the bothersome intrusions of
mosquitoes maintained an awareness of the physical grounding to this existence.
During the hours of both night and day my mind reviewed every conceivable
aspect of my past experience in cinematographic detail. This ‘life-review’
assumed a chronological sequence that, given the vast quantity of material
to be surveyed, continued, almost without a break, from one day to the next.
This process was fuelled by the ingestion of more Chiric Sanango, administered
by
Between the fourth and fifth days this seemingly
all- inclusive ‘past-review’ attained to a sense of completion. The life-
long complex of images, impressions, emotions, and experiences which culminated
in my contemporary sense of ‘self’ cohered in a manner that I had hitherto
only experienced in the context of certain Ayahuasca ceremonies at La Sachamama.
I was mentally and emotionally exhausted but simultaneously aware of an inner
calm that smacked of ‘reconciliation’. This was positively enhanced by a feeling
of achievement, of having earned the right to reap some as yet unimaginable
reward. I imagined I could see clearly how even the darkest experiences of
my past were essential components in the ‘miracle’ of my existence in the
present and in the now positively assessed promise of this with regard to
the future. For the first time in four days I became aware of the fabulous
beauty of my mountain forest surroundings. At last I was looking beyond myself
and what I saw filled me with profound feelings of ‘integration’, ‘belonging’,
and ‘personal value’. I was quite convinced that from this totalised perspective
I saw what I ‘meant’ in relation to the Whole, and the ‘meaning’ I
perceived linked me into a processual context vastly more extensive than that
described within the quotidian parameters of ‘self’. Notwithstanding the fact
that I hadn’t eaten anything at all since before the inaugural Ayahuasca ceremony,
and was thus feeling physically very depleted, I experienced great surges
of psychic energy that suggested I was in some way directly connected to a
source of more than personal power. I felt a deep kinship with the trees and
vegetation surrounding the tambo and half-humorously imagined that five days
of Chiric Sanango had now perhaps qualified me as an ‘honorary plant’. Almost
imperceptibly ‘Hell’ had become ‘Heaven’. Apparently, the undistracted mind
has no alternative but to work through itself, identifying areas of pain and
conflict, and allowing the natural integrative-reconciliatory intrapsychic
processes to work their healing magic. I understood now why Jaques attached
so much importance to this part of the Takiwasi therapy.
Over the next twenty-four hours, in the wake of
this affective transformation, my mind returned to certain experiences that
I had already touched upon, dealing with them more thoroughly where necessary
until they fitted without tension or conflict into the total systemic patterning
of my life-history, a process suggestive of ‘fine-tuning’. By this stage hunger
was the most significant obstacle standing between me and complete equanimity
(I was persistently, and most specifically, haunted by tantalising hallucinations
of vindaloo curries and tubes of ‘Pringles’ crisps). Beyond this the
dominant feeling was of being incredibly fortunate to be alive.
For the last two days of the diet my conscious
experience was, as I had been led to expect, characterised by ‘a profound
reflection on the future’. Having affectively clarified the content of my
personal history in its entirety right up to the point where it became my
experience of the present I began to extrapolate the possible course of my
future from these pre-emptive implications. In some sense I was no longer
experiencing my total historical process according to a past-present-future
linear continuum. In the same way that the sum of my past configured itself
in and as the totality of my present my future was also ‘present’- not in
terms of a rigidly determined imaginal representation but rather as an implicately
encoded immanence (Bohm, D. 1980). The positively weighted reconciliation
I had now established with regard to the content of my past became, when my
consciousness turned itself towards the future, a principle of optimism,
an optimism which my mind embellished with projective imaginings involving
the satisfaction of my deepest desires and ambitions. This locked into my
consciousness as a cognitive-affective system of positive feedback which culminated
in a sustained mood of ‘oceanic’ euphoria.
At
However, as I walked, or rather shuffled, in the
direction of my chicken broth I began to appreciate the cost of such a decision.
My physical energy levels were unprecedentedly depleted and the lowness of
my blood pressure meant that the act of walking brought me perilously close
to blacking out on several occasions. The lack of energy and dramatic loss
of weight now became a source of considerable concern, especially with the
prospect of an arduous trek with rucksack down the mountain and back to Takiwasi
on the following day. The diminution of my stomach meant that the enormity
of my appetite was satisfied with surprising rapidity. As I returned to my
tambo my earlier euphoria was now crossed with an unanticipated sense of anti-climax,
but this, I decided later, was in large measure due to the physical shock
of food.
I did not sleep at all during my last night in
Tambo COCA but rather tossed and turned through an absolute blizzard of thoughts
and impressions as my experiences of the last eight days, indeed of the past
three weeks, crescended with a visionary intensity I had hitherto expected
only from Ayahuasca intoxication. Towards the end of the night I was confronted
by an extraordinary composite entity- a cross between a spotted jaguar and
an anaconda- which I followed into the depths of myself (envisaged as a limitless
forest) until it vanished. This creature seemed to carry with it everything
I had seen during the diet- a symbolic embodiment of insight which
I subsequently needed only to re-visualise to bring its implications, and
knowledge, back into the forefront of consciousness.
SONNCOWASI, ‘HOUSE OF THE HEART’.
My concerns with ‘the future’ during the diet
had included the formulation of a plan of action with regard to the next few
weeks in Tarapoto. After my experiences during the Ayahuasca ceremony that
began the diet my reluctance to take any more Ayahuasca under the auspices
of Takiwasi had become a firm decision to desist. As previously stated one
of my principal fieldwork objectives was the accumulation of comparative Ayahuasca
experiences. Now that I could no longer take Ayahuasca at Takiwasi I had decided
to find an alternative venue. When I got back to my lodging in Tarapoto I
met an Argentinian woman who the previous week had taken part in two ceremonies
at the nearby ‘SONNCOWASI’ ("The House of the Heart", ‘International
School of Amazonian Shamanism’, and hospital of the Director/shaman
Dr. Jorge Gonzalez Ramirez). She had nothing but praise for Sonncowasi, as
had the members of Takiwasi staff I talked to who had participated in ceremonies
there. However, my hopes for a series of ceremonial participations at Sonncowasi
were dashed by the fact that Don Jorge had now left, along with eight gallons
of Ayahuasca, for a two month tour of seminars in the
THE SONNCOWASI CEREMONY.
As soon as it got dark Christina, Adam, Benita
(Christina’s mother), Deborah (the Argentinian woman), and I arranged ourselves
in the Sonncowasi temple in readiness for the ceremony. The temple itself
is a purpose-built octagonal structure with a conical thatched roof. We sat
ourselves in a semi-circle on a raised wooden platform which surrounds a broad
octagonal dance floor of compacted earth. The interior walls of the building
are comprised of pillars of white ‘lattice’ bricks each in the form of an
‘H’ (‘House of the Heart’). Apparently, the temple’s design was taken directly
by Don Jorge from a personal Ayahuasca vision.
Christina opened the proceedings by dedicating
this ‘special’ ceremony to me before preparing the Ayahuasca with a whistled
icaro (power song). As I held a glass full to the brim it struck me
as an unusual brew- less viscous than I was accustomed to and dark green in
colour. It tasted unfamiliar but was nonetheless nauseating. Benita held a
bottle of strong-smelling perfume to my nose to help me keep it down. During
the course of the ceremony I could ask for another dose if I felt I needed
it.
When we had all received our measures, and after
a brief period of quiet, Christina began to sing. Those members of staff I
had spoken to at Takiwasi who had attended ceremonies at Sonncowasi had remarked
on the beauty of Christina’s songs and they were indeed spellbinding. As their
magical tones suffused the onset of Ayahuasca intoxication I felt myself relax
into a state of calm, joyful, privileged celebration- a deep sense
of anticipatory delight reminiscent of the ceremonies at La Sachamama, and
in striking contrast with the dark, cold, nightmarish ambience of those at
Takiwasi. The intoxication stengthened and I grew bolder, moving on all fours,
like a cross between a cat and a spider, into the middle of the dance floor
where I played with my shadow in a pool of moonlight now bluing the earth.
Adam came over to me to say that I could dance but I was still so weak from
the diet that I wasn’t sure whether I could manage it. Anyway, I stood up
and began to move tentatively in a slow, loose, ‘bird-like’ manner, hanging
on the rhythm of Christina’s icaro. My calf muscles were still painful from
the intense cramp I had experienced during the morning’s descent from the
mountain and my physical energy levels very low. I returned quite quickly
to my place at the side of the temple to recuperate and to see whether I was
ready for the visionary component of the intoxication.
After an hour and a half had passed and there
were still no marked visions I thought to myself ‘this is a special ceremony
for me, I can’t come here again for I don’t know how long so I must get the
most out of it; I need to enter the realm of deep visions’. I thus drank another
full measure of Ayahuasca which this time really made me shudder with revulsion.
Fifteen minutes later I was again dancing my ‘eagle dance’. I’d never danced
in this manner before. I just gave myself over to the rhythm of the songs
and allowed my body to move as it pleased. I was now dancing in a vortex of
intensely vivid visions- fabulously coloured flowers and jungle plants all
swirling around my space of consciousness in a whirlwind of staggering kaleidoscopic/fractal
beauty. Indeed I felt as though I was dancing at the centre of the Universe,
the centre from which all the energies and potentialities of life spin out
centripetally and eternally. I was dancing in a tornado of all of life’s most
beautiful creations. I was safe and ecstatically content, spiralling ever
upwards at the funnels’s core on inexorable currents of vision. I was indeed
‘magically flying’.
The visions themselves were of almost unprecedented
intensity (equalled only by certain datura-enhanced experiences at
La Sachamama): shifting patterns of flowers, leaves, trees, tunnels, and coils
of auroral omni-coloured lights. And I saw so much in the ground, in the earth.
At times it was as though I was standing on the surface of a boundless ocean
of visions, falling away infinitely beyond and beneath me. Crouching down
to look into the earth I saw tangles of ‘reptile people’- strange, primitive,
almost alien entities with highly conscious eyes seeming to look at me across
aeons from the deepest core of the human reptile brain, the very beginnings
of human conscious evolution (cf. Harner, M.J.(1980) 1990: Introduction).
I saw into the hearts of ancient jungles coursed with crystalline rivers full
of huge ammonite-type shellfish. There were land snails the size of cars and
trees large enough to accommodate their outsized dimensions. I imagined I
was observing the racapitulation of times when human beings were just a vague,
distant possibility in the future systemic-processual unfolding of life. I
journeyed into the earth and found I could actually ‘swim’ through its lucid
viscosity of visions, exploring ever deeper its other-worldly domains. When
I returned again in the opening of my eyes and looked up the temple was full
of ‘spirits’, crowding in the shadowy portals between the ‘H’-brick pillars
until the entire ritual space appeared surrounded by a seamless, purple-coloured
field of ‘demons’, all clamouring unsuccessfully to gain further access. Notwithstanding
the fact that I felt quite safe I was rather daunted by the seeming proximity
of so much ‘entific malice’. I remember Adam telling me not to worry, ‘this
place is a fortress’.
After more dancing, singing, and incredibly intense
visions the ceremony was formally concluded at about midnight. As we sat around
discussing both individual and collective experiences I was still feeling
very much under the influences of the double dose of Ayahuasca. It had been
a particularly exhilarating ceremony and its aftermath was marked by a sense
of deep gratification coupled with relief- relief that my harrowing experiences
during the Takiwasi ceremonies were apparently ‘localised’ phenomena, specific
to that set and setting. However, as we prepared to go our separate ways for
the night everything changed with alarming suddenness. Quite without
warning I felt myself overcome by a wave of fear which manifested itself physically
in the form of a deep, deathly, bone-chilling cold. Much to the surprise of
the others I collapsed to the floor in an agony of panic. This feeling was
rooted in an incontrovertible conviction that I was actually dying. Telling
myself that the physical collapse was undoubtedly a reaction to the demands
of the Chiric Sanango diet combined with the emotional intensity and physical
exertions of the ceremony did nothing to allay my fear. I had been assured
before the ceremony that there was no evidence for any adverse reaction occurring
between Chiric Sanango and Ayahuasca. Indeed, Adam had recently undertaken
a Chiric Sanango diet during which time he participated in two Ayahuasca ceremonies
without any ill effects. Nevertheless, I knew that drug synergy in the context
of differing physiological constitutions is, in varying degrees, unpredictable.
The element of doubt attendant upon this awareness was sufficient to accentuate
to the point of conviction my fear that I was possibly experiencing a severe,
and potentialy fatal, allergic reaction. The symptomatic feelings of
intense cold and fear naturally pointed to the Chiric Sanango which Jaques
had told me would still be ‘working’ in me for several weeks after the formal
conclusion of the diet (I was yet to learn of ‘the frosty whites of a tryptamine
crash’).
I imagined myself to be locked irreversibly into
the process of dying and there was nothing anyone could do to prevent it taking
its course. I was falling into the ground through the earth of the dance floor
as though Hell itself was swallowing me up into an eternal ‘anti-womb’. I
was convinced I would remain forever frozen in this ‘space of death’ (Taussig,
M. 1987, 1997), far too deep for anyone to be able to find me. In the world
above I imagined I would live out the rest of my physical life ricocheting
around a padded cell. There were moments when I felt quite completely insane
with fear- as though being buried alive and racked by a billion indescribable
agonies of emotional pain which added a sense of burning to my torment-
burning cold. ‘The House of the Heart’, so recently an experiential heaven,
had now become the deepest dungeon in Hell and all I wanted was peace, a cessation
of the thoughts and visions that appeared to be tearing my soul apart, unconsciousness,...death.
But although death seemed terrifyingly close I couldn’t actually die.
The implications of my death for those I love, my relatives and friends, were
envisaged in awful detail and this strengthened my resolve to resist annihilation,
notwithstanding the excruciations of affective pain. I was thus stalemated
between an intense desire to live and an equivalently intense desire to die.
At this stage the others helped me to a bed in a room adjacent to the main
temple enclosure and there, after a long talk with Adam (the only native English
speaker), I fought on with ‘my dying’ until dawn. My desire to live gradually
overcame my desire to die as I came to realise that my literally dying would
require a consciously willed act of self-destruction. Once I had accepted
the ‘reality’ of this fact- that in these particular circumstances whether
I lived or died was clearly a mater of personal choice and hence control-
I regained a rational perspective on the situation and began to emerge from
affectively the closest encounter with death that I have ever experienced.
Notwithstanding the obvious unpleasantness of
the latter half of my Ayahuasca experience at Sonncowasi it did provide me
with an invaluable opportunity to verify personally the affective equivalence
posited as existing between circumstantial and the more extreme forms of ritually/hallucinogenically
induced near-death experiences, albeit in this instance with an emphasis on
the negative (i.e. ‘resistance’) aspects of such phenomena. While certain
of my Ayahuasca experiences during the introductory diet at La Sachamama (see
PART 1 above)
involved affectively intense confrontions with the reality of death none of
them induced in me a sense so completely indistinguishable from a personally
endured circumstantial NDE as did the Sonncowasi experience. It might be reasonable
to suppose that the conducive factor missing at La Sachamama was a state of
severe physical and emotional depletion with which to augment the psychological
conviction of death’s imminence.
A STRATEGY FOR HEALING.
After the three Takiwasi Ayahuasca ceremonies,
the demands of the Chiric Sanango diet, and the singularly traumatic experiences
at Sonncowasi I found myself in a very poor state of psychophysical health.
I had lost almost two stones in weight and the pre-diet depression had returned
with a vengeance, notwithstanding the ultimate affective positivity of the
diet experience itself. For the next week I moved disconsolately between Takiwasi
and Sonncowasi attempting to relocate a centre of psychological balance. It
was a time of intense ‘free-floating’ anxiety- non-specifically directed and
stubbornly resistant to my best efforts at resolution. The people at Sonncowasi
generously provided me with a home- solicitous company, a semblance
of emotional security, and large quantities of excellent food- in which to
begin the process of personal re-integration and healing.
During the hours of solitary reflection I spent
amid the vines of Sonncowasi’s ‘Ayahuasca garden’ I came to the conclusion
that my condition was going to require a cure more radical than any I could
hope to find in Tarapoto. Ideally, such a cure would have to be conducted
in familiar surroundings with the support of friends. I knew of only one place
in Peru that could satisfy all of these demands- my beloved Sachamama.
I discussed my predicament and intentions with
Jaques Mabit and he agreed that an ‘Ayahuasca retreat in a natural environment’
would probably be the best solution. He warned me to be very careful as in
my post-diet state I would be particularly vulnerable to the psychic machinations
of unscrupulous shamans and could become very ill. However, I didn’t think
there was much scope for me to become any more ill than I already was
after a month in Tarapoto. Without further ado I settled my accounts with
Takiwasi and bought a ticket for Iquitos.
RETURN TO ‘LA SACHAMAMA’.
Having arrived in Iquitos I left my luggage at
a hotel in the city and then went straight to La Sachamama. I had taken something
of a gamble in arriving unannounced as I had no way of knowing whether the
Director, Don Francisco Montes, would even be there and I had a maximum of
only two weeks before I would have to return to Lima. Notwithstanding these
uncertainties my walk through the forest from the Nauta road to the ‘sacred
hill’ was attended by a distinct elevation of mood, a definite feeling of
‘going home’. A little after I reached the garden Don Francisco appeared and
following a delightful reunion we discussed my situation and its attendant
sickness. He was, as I had expected, thoroughly familiar with these
sorts of affliction, a familiarity which both commended my decision to come
to La Sachamama and allayed any doubts I might have had about his being able
to effect a cure. Don Francisco prescribed a twelve day period of curacion,
or healing, at La Sachamama. This would involve a strict diet of unsalted
rice, yucca, and clavohuasca tea, a programme of ritual flower perfume baths,
sopladas, and five Ayahuasca ceremonies under the auspices of the La Sachamama
shaman, Don Fernando Lachi. There just happened to be a ceremony scheduled
for that evening and so my curacion would begin.
THE CURACION.
The emphasis throughout this programme of psychophysical
therapy would be couched in terms of ‘cleansing’. The severe depression I
was experiencing was, according to Don Francisco, due to an accumulation of
‘negative energies’ which had apparently begun during the Ayahuasca ceremonies
at Takiwasi. The processes of a consolidated psychic infection had been indicated
by my experience of intense cold at the last of these. The ‘coldness’ of the
Chiric Sanango diet could not be taken as symptomatic as this was an expected
feature of the plant’s effects. However, the physical depletions occasioned
by the diet coupled with the psychological and emotional trauma of the Ayahuasca
ceremony at Sonncowasi would have accentuated the negative influence these
energies were exerting in my ‘bodymind’ complex. Within this complex the energies
had now established themselves firmly as a self-perpetuating, self-reinforcing
feedback system of which my feelings of depression, anxiety, and general malaise
were an outward expression. A ritual diet of bland food and clavohuasca would
effect a basic cleansing of my material substrate, perfume baths and
sopladas would re-equilibrate its disturbed balance of energies, and Ayahuasca
would establish a perceptually holistic experiential field in which the systemically
emergent healing potentialities of the therapy could be realised. I felt better
already.
The first ceremony of my curacion followed the
familiar pattern to a fault (see PART 1 above).
Don Fernando presided and Don Francisco assisted him, drinking a small measure
of Ayahuasca himself to aid in a more detailed diagnosis of my sickness. When
it came to my turn I drank with a considerable amount of trepidation as the
memories of my Takiwasi and Sonncowasi experiences crowded into my mind. However,
this feeling was kept within bounds by my complete trust in the expertise
of Don Fernando and Don Francisco, and an unflinching conviction in the efficacy
of their healing art. As the ceremony began I was deeply conscious of having
delivered my soul, indeed my life, into their hands.
With a tremendous sense of relief I found myself
effortlessly re-accessing the visionary domains I had come to associate with
La Sachamama during my introductory diet. The imagery was predominantly ‘forest-derived’,
the affective content characterised by a feeling of relaxed awe, while cognitively
the experience was once again a symphony of systemic insights. Biographical
material, which had proved such an oppressive feature of my Takiwasi experiences,
was painlessly contextualised in the broader significatory frameworks of a
transpersonal perspective. The individual healing phase of the ceremony
was for me a more restrained affair than previously and I got the distinct
impression that Don Fernando was cautiously assessing my current ‘energific’
state, not wishing to engage too directly with it until he was sure what he
was dealing with.
However, there was to be no ‘quick fix’ and I
awoke on the morning after this first ceremony in a largely unaltered state
of agitation. During my subsequent debriefing Don Francisco said that at the
ceremony, under the influence of Ayahuasca, he had seen in me a strong build-up
of very ‘dark’ energies that would require considerable effort to clear away.
He again assured me that it wouldn’t be a problem, and I have to say there
wasn’t a moment when I doubted him.
Each morning and evening (where possible) during
the period of the curacion Don Francisco would administer a flower bath and
soplada. Stripped to the waist I would sit on a stool in the middle of the
dormitory malocca and he would begin by blowing mapacho (organic) tobacco
smoke through a large knot of hard red wood and then painted it with a perfume
extracted from Ajosacha flowers. I had to clasp this knot in both hands
before my chest and keep it there while Don Francisco whistled icaros and
whisked my upper body with perfume. He paid special attention to the crown
of my head. When he had done this to his satisfaction he removed the knot
from my hands, perfumed my palms and told me to wash my face. He then moved
back to my crown, sweeping down to my neck and shoulders, and then along my
outstretched arms and beyond my fingertips. Each long sweep culminated in
his deliberately flicking the shacapa whisk away from my body as though
shaking off something undesirable. He would then light a mapacho cigarette
and blow smoke into various points on my body selected by the exploratory
application of finger pressure. Again the crown of my head received the most
attention. After each of these procedures I was left with a vivid, and affectively
relieving impression/sensation of having been deeply ‘cleaned’, not in any
exclusively physical sense but more in terms of having just experienced a
‘soul bath’. It was as though my total ‘body-mind-soul’ complex had been purificatorily
addressed as a systemic whole via the materially embodied aspect. I
imagined I could literally feel my consciousness being cleaned of depressive
influences, each subsequent bath leaving it a little more transparent until
‘crystalline’ became the adjective most frequently used in my field journal
to describe its newfound perceptual clarity. Indeed, towards the end of the
curacion I became quite fixated on the qualities of rock crystal.
The second Ayahuasca ceremony of the curacion
was dominated by visions and affective impressions of cleaning. After an initial
dazzling excursion into a dimension of pure ‘plant spirits’ I started to experience
a marked nausea and this was accompanied by a sense of the ‘soul-filth’ I
had become infected with in Tarapoto. Imaginally ‘the once clear waters of
my soul’ appeared to be full of innumerable plastic barrels seeping highly
toxic waste. My mind combined this imagery with a physical need to vomit and
by the time I was sick over the back of the bench at the far end of La Sachamama’s
Ayahuasca temple it was this bitter filth from Tarapoto that I was purging
into the forest- awful poisons that apparently came up from the depths of
my being with great physical effort and left my mouth with a taste like petrol.
During the stage of individual healing Don Fernando had to work very hard
to extract the lingering traces of this filth which I now visualised as an
oily essence of darkness. Gradually his songs, ‘shacaparing’, and powerful
presence seemed to gather this darkness into a concentrated field of black
energy which he then deliberately swept to one side. I actually felt it leaving
me to the right, holding on to the last like sticky tar before it was finally
disconnected. The moment this happened I experienced my consciousness flood
with something very akin to ‘daylight’, an impression affectively attended
by a sensation of euphoric, if exhausted, relief.
The third ceremony was to constitute ‘the turning
point’ of the curacion. During this ceremony I experienced the final overcoming
of my sickness- a dramatic resolution of intrapsychic conflict- and the subsequent
re-establishment of an uncompromised, stable state of positive well-being,
a state enduringly reflected in both ‘ordinary’ and ‘non-ordinary’ consciousness.
The following extract from my field journal, written on the morning after
the ceremony, is quoted in full as the most direct means of communicating
the nature of this condition:
‘Last night’s ceremony was among the most dramatic
of the entire series of nineteen- a night of almost unimaginably powerful
transcendental healing. I am only just beginning to appreciate the awesome
potency of Ayahuasca ‘bodymind’ therapy, but last night’s experiences constitute
something of a ‘quantum leap’ in understanding. For this leap to be
possible it was crucial for me to be in a sufficiently severe state of psychophysical
sickness. To get to the heart of the shamanic healing process one must actually
be healed shamanically. It’s been an incredibly hard, painful lesson but the
insights I have attained from observing the cause, course, and cure of this
recent sickness are more than worth the terrible agonies that have been entailed.
In the process of rebirth effected by the curacion I am now at the
point of conception, the beginning of the Universe in little- a timeless moment
of infinite possibility awaiting the infallible dictates of Cosmic consciousness.
This is ‘the still point’- purest essence of nothing, the crystalline core
of ‘No- Mind’, and the ecstatic absolution of Zero. I am deeply conscious
of my infinity and my eternity. In being absolutely ‘nothing’ I am simultaneously
‘everything’ awaiting the genomic influences of consciousness to realise
it. I am pure future rooted in a pristine present untainted by the legacies
of a past- a position of unprecedented sublimity. I am indeed as new and immaculate
as the moment it all begins which is of course NOW.’
The final two ceremonies were in effect consolidations
of this position. In both of these I was deeply conscious of having reached
a point of experiential ‘closure’, the end of an introductory era. There was
a notable absence of new material, either in terms of visions or philosophical
insights, and instead the experiences took the form of general assessments
of my new state and stage. This came as a relief as I had no desire to be
presented with anything that would require further radical realignments of
‘self’ nor to embark upon the next phase of transformation. I was content
to leave this for my next period of fieldwork, whenever that might be. I felt
as though my future had been literally ‘reborn’, successfully delivered into
a present where everything once again perceptibly unfolded in perfect harmony
and I was utterly content with my fate. I perceived my ‘self-world’
relation in terms of a new order, an order of higher degree, and this because
it now included an integrated patterning of my recent dire conflicts in a
state of non-pathogenic resolution. My bodymind was exquisitely clean
and I saw myself and the Universe as a unity of infinite light- pure consciousness.
Twelve days after arriving at La Sachamama I walked
back through the forest towards Iquitos and my flight to the worlds beyond
feeling deeply grateful towards Don Francisco and Don Fernando, highly fortunate
to have been sick enough to experience personally a shamanic curacion, and
vividly alive.
CONCLUSION.
Looking back over my first period of preliminary
fieldwork I described the attendant experiences as comprising ‘a study in
serendipity’. The unexpected undertaking of a six week introductory Ayahuasca
diet involving twelve ritual journeys into ‘the Realm of Visions’ provided
me with a body of crucial insights into the workings of Ayahuasca shamanism’s
multidimensional therapeutic process. The phenomenological/analytic orientation
of my project necessitated a personal embodiment of the experiential
knowledge associated with this process, and particularly a personal negotiation
of the ‘death-rebirth’ affective assemblage at the heart of which lies a core
transformational dynamic which I have come to refer to as ‘The Ecstatic Insight’.
The attitude changes consequent to the experiential negotiation of the processual
reality of death are seen to be encoded or ‘seminally implicated’ within
this insight. Thus the Ayahuasca diet brought me experientially to the point
from which my subsequent analyses of the associated biopsychosocial dynamics
must begin. The Ecstatic Insight both induces and constitutes a shift in ‘reality
perspective’ so fundamental and all-implicating that the experient’s ‘reality
relation’ is permanently altered. It is from this radical experiential re-orientation
of the perceived relationship between self and world that the
re- evaluative/psychotherapeutically conducive attitude changes are seen to
unfold.
Having established a pattern of cumulative consistency
existing within the experiential framework of a series of ritual intoxications
it became necessary to examine the influence of ‘set and setting’ on the intrapsychic
effects of Ayahuasca. The opportunity to participate in Ayahuasca ceremonies
at the Takiwasi Centre provided an appropriate experiential context for such
a comparative assessment. It also provided me with an opportunity to gain
firsthand knowledge of the manner in which such Ayahuasca experiences are
incorporated within the psychotherapeutic protocols of an operational drug
rehabilitation programme.
As I had suspected for a phenomenon within which
analytically discrete components must be seen as mutually determining parts
of a multidimensional systemic whole a change of context dramatically influences
the affective quality of the Ayahuasca experience itself. The effects of such
a change of context are demonstrated unequivocally in the foregoing account
of my personal experience of ritual Ayahuasca intoxication at Takiwasi when
compared with that for the introductory diet at La Sachamama (see PART 1 above).
The Chiric Sanango diet, as described above, was
initially seen to be something of a digression from the principal focus of
my project. However, in order to gain a clearer understanding of the total
therapeutic field provided by Takiwasi it was essential for me to experience
personally the manner in which the Ayahuasca dimension of the therapy is integrated
with other components. As things transpired the Chiric Sanango diet was to
be far from digressional. Rather it provided a temporal and spatial context
conducive to an extended and undistracted experiential assessment of near-death
phenomena as manifest in traditional Amazonian psychotherapies. The extended
nature of the time frame in which the shamanic death-rebirth process is experienced
under the influences of Chiric Sanango facilitated a detailed observation
of the intrapsychic restructuring dynamics of the process, particularly with
regard to ‘biographical’ realignments and the function of these in relation
to the experiences of transpersonalism. Again, the ever-broadening scope of
the biographical-transpersonal systemic contextualisation appeared to expand
from the affective singularity of a core insight into the totality
of experience. All subsequent affects and insights associated with the therapy’s
transformational processes were seen to constellate around this ecstatic core.
While I would have liked to have been in a position
to undertake a series of ritual participations at Sonncowasi the unprecedented
intensity of the near-death experiential component of the one ceremony I did
manage to participate in enabled me to explore the limits of the equivalence
posited as existing between circumstantial and ritual circumthanatological
phenomena, albeit from a perspective specific to my own personal psychophysical
constitution.
I could not have anticipated that my experiences
in Tarapoto would have culminated in a seriously debilitating psychophysical
condition. Indeed if I had I would no doubt have attempted to avoid or at
least minimise such consequences. However, the establishment of such a state
of affliction in the experiential context afforded by Amazonian Ayahuasca
shamanism provided me with an ideal opportunity to participate observationally
in the field as a ‘patient’. Experiencing firsthand the intrapsychic processes
of a traditional shamanic curacion was an extraordinary stroke of luck with
regard to my understanding of not only the psychotherapeutic processes involved
but also of the relationship between the experience of being healed and the
affective rationales underpinning subsequent compulsions to heal others. In
addition, the equivalence of the experiential fields encountered during both
my first and second sojourns at La Sachamama further confirmed the importance
of ‘set and setting’ in relation to the total qualitative characteristics
of ritualised Ayahuasca intoxication.
The two periods of preliminary fieldwork I have
now undertaken in Peruvian Amazonia, and their extensive ceremonial participations,
constitute a personal orientation within the experiential domains within which
contemporary Ayahuasca therapies operate. The emphasis throughout has been
on a personal experiential familiarisation with the intrapsychic dimensions
and affective/attitudinal consequences of Ayahuasca intoxication. From such
a point of personal familiarity I am now in a position to broaden the focus
of my inquiry to a formal assessment of the psychophysical experiences of
other people within the field of ritualised Ayahuasca intoxication and the
impact of these on the social matrices in which they are contextualised.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.
I would like to take this opportunity to extend
my thanks to the ‘Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies’ (MAPS,
Florida), and particularly Mr. Bruce Pavitt, for the generous pledge of a
travel stipend without which this second period of preliminary fieldwork would
not have been possible. Thanks are also due to Jaques Mabit and all the staff
and patients at the Takiwasi Centre in Tarapoto. The accommodation of my participatory
requirements within Takiwasi’s busy rehabilitatory programme is greatly appreciated.
A special mention must go to the people of Sonncowasi both for the staging
of an unscheduled Ayahuasca ceremony and for providing me with an environment
conducive to personal healing. Finally I must express my heartfelt gratitude
to the director of La Sachamama Ethnobotanical Garden, Don Francisco Montes,
and to the La Sachamama shaman, Don Fernando Lachi. Without their kind consideration
and expert administration of a shamanic curacion this second period of fieldwork
could not have concluded so positively. Not only did they safely introduce
me to the powers of Ayahuasca shamanism during my first period of fieldwork
they have subsequently, in this second period, taught me how to survive them.
Last, but far from least, more thanks than I can express in words must go
to Helen and my family who patiently negotiate both the highs and the lows
of my journeys with equal understanding, and support. None of this
would have been possible without them.
POST-SCRIPT
It was only on returning to England that I came
to appreciate the true cost of my post-Takiwasi afflictions and subsequent
curacion. Ten days after my departure from La Sachamama my supervisor met
Don Francisco in Iquitos. The first thing he asked her, and almost before
the conclusion of customary greetings, was ‘how’s Marcus?’ Marcus was
in fact fine and still basking in the euphoric afterglow of the most affectively
intense near-death experience of his entire life. It was immediately obvious
to Dr Barbira-Freedman that the master shaman was not at all well himself.
Apparently, the enormous energies he was compelled to expend in re-equilibrating
my own had left him severely depleted and it would be several more days before
he finally regained his normal demeanour of seemingly inviolable good health.
It was then eighteen months before I saw him again, this time in surroundings
strikingly alien to the familiar forest contexts of our friendship. He was
one of three guest-exhibitors of Ayahuasca- inspired art (‘Inner Visions’)
at a private gallery near London’s Russell Square. It was only then that I
managed to thank him properly for gathering me back to the world of the living,
which is as much as to say for saving my life, a fact I had only fully appreciated
long after those desperate nights of visionary battle on the shadowside of
magic.
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* * *
Marcus C.Y. Lumby, MA, MA, DCH, DHP, ©2000
Bracklyn, Winchfield, Nr. Hook, Hampshire RG27
8BU, England.
E-mail: marcus.lumby@virgin.net