Four more reasons to drink Ayahuasca

Nigredo by Anselm Kiefer, 1984

I am writing this post after two ceremonies of a ten-day dieta. In the ten-day dietas that I have been doing, we drink ayahuasca five times, every other day and also a companion plant at least twice on the evenings at the beginning of the dieta when we are not drinking ayahuasca. The companion plant is usually prepared as some kind of tea by using it either as a resin from a tree trunk, boiling it, mixing it or mashing a plant up with water or alcohol.

The basic idea of the dieta is to make contact with the spirit of the plant. La Madre Ayahausca’s role is to facilitate this contact. One of her many talents is to help inter-species communication. The spirit of the plant can then convey healing, visions, knowledge and strength to the person dieting the plant. This can then be further used to cure or to curse people. My mentor PapaM. says it is much easier to hurt than to heal, which may be part of the explanation why the Peruvian indigenous and mestizo ayahuasca world is riddled with witchcraft.

Mandragora Spirit by Johnathon Blackthorn

In other blog entries, I have written of my experience of contact with these plant spirits. I am increasingly of the belief that this was a mistake.

When I was conversing with a friend recently, she told me that the Achuar, an indigenous people she had been working with in Ecuador, believe that any visions offered by the plant spirits should remain secret until they have come to pass. They are offered as a sacred gift and to tell others is disrespectful of the gift.

It does seem, at least in my case, that making them public leads them to withdraw.

Part of my reason for writing in the past about these experiences was to express my astonishment and delight at them. Typically Western rationalist materialism would dismiss these experiences as delusional caused by a hallucinogenic substance but mine and others experience indicates that these experiences are part of other realities which have been denied and denigrated by our monotheistic culture’s limited worldview.

Actually if you look hard enough in the Western cultural tradition you can find examples of radically different ways of understanding the world. I am thinking particularly of twentieth century writers like C.J. Jung, James Hillman, and Henri Corbin who have mapped out with rigor the world of the soul’s imagination or as Jung called it the ‘objective psyche’.

We could also include Goethe’s work on developing a different scientific method based on participation with  the world rather than its objectification, distancing and consequent alienation. This work was further developed by Rudolf Steiner who I am beginning to realize was an extraordinary and perceptive explorer of what he called “Higher Dimensions of Consciousness”

(Incidentally, there is a wonderful series of three videos on YouTube by two teachers based at the Californian Institute of Integral Studies lecturing on Steiner and Jung.)

In this blog entry, however rather than exploring the philosophic background of the western worldview which I have done before, I want to return to my recent experiences with La Madre Ayahuasca.

In the three ceremonies I have had since returning from seven ayahuasca free weeks in Mexico, I have felt out of personal contact with La Madre Ayahuasca and the plants I have dieted before, visionless, and, in a nutshell, profoundly stuck – physically experiencing nausea that lasts for hours and which I have been unable to shift by purging, mentally re-running the same pattern of thoughts, emotionally feeling bereft and despairing, and spiritually feeling empty.

Towards the end of the second ceremony, the thought came to me that I am in the nigredo. This is an essential and unavoidable part of the cyclical alchemical process in which everything darkens, decomposes, putrefies, slows down to standstill, becomes uniformly flat and depressed.

Te sense is that there is no way out and this will last for ever. Misery is the defining feature. It is Shakespeare’s ‘ghastly night’, St. John of the Cross’ ‘dark night of the soul’ and Jung’s ‘confrontation with the shadow’.

Knowing this is in some ways helpful as it at least offers a wider perspective, but the nature of this alchemical stage is that the lived experience of it, rather than the rational mind’s thoughts about it, is deathlike. We are in the underworld without a map.

Part of my experience of this phase is deep existential doubt. Why I am doing this? Am I deluding myself?  Is this some kind of ground zero reality which I will always return to and never escape from? Is it really leading anywhere? Although I think La Madre Ayahuasca in common with Heidegger and Hillman is trying to break us out of this habitual mental framework that we have to be moving along a developmental, progressive planned path.

artwork by menton3: xaxor.com/drawings/artworks-by-menton3.html

This really brings me to the point of this blog entry. Why drink ayahuasca?

The notion that it is a short cut to spiritual enlightenment is laughable. Even the flurry of recent articles on the growth of ayahausca in the Western world and its popularization by increasing celebrity endorsement point out that making you shit and vomit does not predispose its use as a recreational drug.

In an earlier blog, I laid out seven reasons to drink ayahuasca. I believe these still hold. They are, though, very general and my recent experience is giving me other more specific ideas.

So here are four more reasons to drink ayahausca which help me answer the question posed in the paragraph above about why am I still doing this.

1. It helps with  problem solving.

After one ceremony I was walking around the ugly, dusty city of Pucallpa musing about what to do with two cameras that I had bought which had parts missing. Suddenly I saw other options to deal with this. This is a deliberately tiny and mundane example of a wider process in that it seems to me that La Madre Ayahuasca widens our perspectives about everything not just our deep rooted emotional and/or spiritual problems but how to fix the everyday details and challenges of life.

In his book, ‘Intelligence in Nature’, Jeremy Narby talks of an experiment he helped conduct when three molecular biologists drank ayahuasca and were asked to focus on current particularly thorny research quandaries they were experiencing. Two of them received significantly new ideas on how to proceed.

Another way of framing this is in terms of creativity. La Madre loves creativity, loves helping us overcome our creative blocks. Having written relatively little recently, I suddenly found the words for this blog appearing late at night when really I had been planning to sleep.

2. It helps us appreciate the subtlety and sophistication of the plant world.

I certainly was educated in the conventional belief that the plant world was vastly inferior to the human world.

La Madre Ayahuasca shows us that there is an extraordinary intelligence at work in the plant world. Interestingly science does seem to be catching up with this as shown by a good recent article in the New Yorker by Michael Pollan.

Again to make this very specific and everyday, I really like the comment made somewhere by Jeremy Narby that drinking ayahuasca made him more careful and aware when he was walking on grass.

God knows that on the larger scale the world needs this increased understanding of the importance of the ecological web in all our lives and the damage we are doing to it. La Madre Ayahausca is doing her best to teach us this on every level.

3. It helps balance and integrate thinking, feeling and action.

I wrote once before that I thought it was a mistake to continue to work and be engaged in the social world during a dieta. Traditionally dietas were done alone in the deep jungle with the sole human contact, if any, being with the dietero’s Maestro. This isolation helps facilitate contact with the plant spirits. They are unlikely to appear in the midst of a difficult meeting or when traveling on a motortaxi in Pucallpa.

However, after writing before that I felt it was mistake to have to work during dieta, I subsequently realized that the dieta had helped me see things vividly that I had only been subconsciously aware of beforehand and had helped give me the clarity, resolve and conviction to take two important difficult decisions that had wide consequences for my working and personal life.

On this dieta, alongside the experiences in ceremony of feeling stuck, and with very little sleep, I have been able to gain insights into work and other relationally-based situations that has enabled me to take important action.

Overall, I find La Madre Ayahuasca helps shorten the time between intuitive understanding, the processing of that into a more conscious awareness, and then taking action. For other people, not suffering the doubt and hesitation that I sometimes do, I could imagine her helping them rein in their impulsiveness.

4. It makes difficult conversations easier.

Again through having to work in this dieta, (but at least not every day), I have been in situations where I have needed to engage in what management text books like to call “the art of difficult conversations”.  These have been much easier. I have not felt the anxiety and hesitation that I would typically feel and find myself to be much clearer in my thinking and articulate with my words.

Towards a New Ethic – “Social Science that does not break your heart is not worth doing”

“Scientists tell us we are made of atoms but a little bird told me we are made of stories”

In this blog entry I want to relate and connect together experiences I have had whilst being in Mexico the last three weeks – first through participating in a series of seminars organized by three academic institutions based in Guadalajara on the theme of complexity, dialogue and interdisciplinary work, and secondly watching the on-line launch of the new film ‘Aya Awakenings’ and the subsequent panel discussion.

A key theme of this blog has been how the experiences we have with La Madre Ayahuasca take us beyond our conventional, culturally determined ways of experiencing and making sense of the world. They show us that we normally think of as solid, taken-for-granted reality is consensually produced and socially validated. Some would describe this ‘normal’ reality as a hallucination.

The anthropologist Jeremy Narby has commented that our experience with ayahuasca is a profound challenge to the patriarchal, materialist and rationalist worldview, which has dominated the Western world for the past nearly five hundred years and been the foundation for the Scientific Revolution and what is often referred to as “modernity”.

My last blog entry on the work of Richard Tarnas showed how his rigorous scholarship has carefully traced the unfolding of this worldview in the history of Western philosophy. He believes that this worldview is now in crisis and that we are in transition to a potentially new more inclusive understanding of the world which recuperates the lost and suppressed feminine, and also brings us back full-circle to an indigenous worldview in which self and world interpenetrate one another and in which both are ensouled and enchanted.

As Tarnas and others show, the fundamental assumptions of the reductionist, Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm have been severely questioned in three ways:

First, from within science itself as the limitations of the mechanist worldview have been exposed initially at the beginning of the twentieth century by quantum mechanics and at the end of the last century by the sciences of chaos and complexity. The work of Thomas Kuhn, too, in the philosophy of science has done much to undermine the Enlightenment ideal that science is always advancing in a linear, progressive way to a more complete, objective and better understanding of reality.

Secondly, from the whole thrust of post-modern philosophy initiated by Nietzsche and further developed by Heidegger, the later Wittgenstein, Foucault and Derrida. These philosophers, amongst many others, have demonstrated that modernity’s criteria of valid knowledge as universal, timeless, value-free and independent of personal, cultural and historical context and political interests is a convenient fiction. In fact, it has been the impressive sleight of hand of modernity to propose its partial view of the world in the name of objectivity as the only route to valid knowledge. This perspective is then used to deride other forms of knowledge and cultures, such as those of indigenous peoples’, as superstitious and primitive.

Thirdly, the history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with their world wars, genocides and ecological devastations profoundly problematizes the Enlightenment notion of progress – that the rational application of science and technology would lead to an increasingly better, more humane and just  world.

The idea of being at a key social and philosophical turning point has been around since at least Fritjof Capra’s book “The Turning Point”, published in 1982, in which he argued that society needed to adopt a more holistic, systems-based approach to resolving the social, economic and especially ecological problems that, by then, were becoming increasingly evident. The idea, too, is found in Joanna Macy’s notion of “The Great Turning”, which she defines as the shift from an industrial, growth-based society to a life sustaining civilization.

This theme of transition is also an important dimension of a new film by Australian counter-culturalist Rak Razam about ayahuasca called “Aya Awakenings”. The film puts forward the idea that we are witnessing and participating in a global evolutionary change of consciousness facilitated by the growing use and spread of ayahuasca throughout the world.

I have to confess that I find some of the language used to describe this transition over-optimistic and self-inflationary – for example, to exaggerate only a little, the promotion of the adventurous ‘psychonaut’ as the hyperspace pioneer mid-wiving a new, world-saving form of consciousness.

In contrast, in the Evolver-organized panel discussion of the film, Dennis McKenna spoke eloquently about the need for humility and his repeated experience of being shown by the plants that individually and collectively as species we really know very little. As he says, the plants tell us that: “You monkeys only think you are in control”. Note how this is in sharp contrast to the assumptions of modernity which emphasize control and certainty.

It is within this context of  the shift in understandings of the world – plus my experiences with La Madre Ayahuasca, which have shown me that “other worlds are possible” – that I approached the task of contributing to a series of seminars co-organized by three academic bodies in Guadalajara. The challenge for all of us is to take these ideas concerning a shift to more life sustaining forms of being and genuinely embody them in our lives and work, not just pay lip service to them.

One of these three academic institutions, in particular, is really grappling with the issue of what it means to actively engage in changing social systems by generating new action and knowledge in the changing intellectual, social and ecological context – of complexity, trans-disciplinary work (to tackle problems like violence and environmental degradation in a holistic way and overcome the limitations created by separate academic disciplines). All this implies working with tools and methodologies that promote dialogue – understanding that new knowledge and new solutions to outstanding problems are generated by people being and thinking together.

Once we see through the myth of objectivity, as can be seen in the work of one of the key contributors to the seminars, Dr Denise Dajmanovitch, we are then forced to recognize that all research is value based – that is all research carries, often in a hidden way, its own ethics.

In a seminar with the institution mentioned above, some important aspects of this new ethics began to emerge. This process was itself illustrative as it embodied the idea found in the study of complex adaptive living systems at all levels, from neurons to the universe, that life evolves, and creativity happens, through open-ended, unplanned, self-organizing processes. The explicit intention of the seminar had not been to unpack this ethic – it arose in an unexpected way through interaction – thus showing the usefulness of dialogue as a method of generating new perspectives.

The aspects of this new ethic are:

Participation: the way to understand and change social situations is through participation and engagement with people not through distance. From this perspective, conventional notions of detached observation are a defense against involvement.

Commitment: engaging with people facing any major social and/or environmental problem requires commitment.

Mutuality: as we form committed relationships, we enter into mutual obligations and expectations, what the theologian Buber calls ‘I-Thou’, rather than ‘I-It’ relations.

Conviviality: this term was first coined by the philosopher and Catholic priest Ivan Illich in his far-sighted critiques of Western health and educational institutions to describe the necessity to develop tools for human flourishing rather than the dependency which describes peoples relationships to mechanistic social systems. The Spanish word ‘convivir’, which could colloquially be translated into American as ‘hanging out together’, is an important aspect of Mexican culture. This dimension, therefore, is highly culturally congruent.

The Cultivation of Care: a key dimension of mutual obligation that we enter into is care – of the other person/people and their environment.

Permeability: we have to allow ourselves to be effected by the others we engage with – as the alternative title of this blog, which is taken from an article by Ellis and Bochner (2000) suggests: “Social science that does not break your heart is not worth doing”.

Intimacy: in allowing ourselves to be effected by the ‘other’, and as we move from the mechanistic to the affective world, we enter into relations of intimacy.

Interestingly, all these aspects apply to our relationship with La Madre Ayahuasca. We enter into a participative relationship with her that entails obligations (see an earlier blog based on Steve Beyer’s idea that we incur obligations to the spirit world), mutual commitments and intimacy. If we try to use her by forming an instrumental relationship with her for our own benefit (financial or otherwise), it is likely she will withdraw.

It seems increasingly, as Dennis McKenna and others suggest, that La Madre Ayahuasca and other plants are communicating to us, urging us to wake up, to assume the responsibilities that are incumbent on us as co-participants, rather than dominators, in the exquisite, delicate web of planetary life.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Passion of the Western Mind – ¿Paradise Regained?

Now that I have a better internet connection in Mexico, I have been watching the series of ten one-hour lectures on YouTube that Richard Tarnas gave about the life and work of James Hillman in 2012 as a course in the Philosophy, Cosmology and Consciousness Program at the California Institute for Integral Studies.

These lectures are excellent for two reasons. First, they are an informative, interesting and accessible account of the important and challenging work of James Hillman, (which I have written about before on this blog in relation to ayahuasca). Secondly, they illustrate well the ideas of Richard Tarnas, as he presents what he calls a ‘trialogue’ between the ideas of Jung, Hillman and himself.

From 1974 to 1984, Richard Tarnas lived and worked at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, studying with Joseph Campbell, Gregory Bateson, Huston Smith, James Hillman, and Stanislav Grof, and later served as its director of programs and education. He, therefore, was exposed to the ideas and presence of some of the most interesting and original figures outside the confines of  the mainstream of twentieth century thought.

Between 1980 and 1990, Richard Tarnas wrote the hugely impressive book ‘The Passion of the Western Mind’. This is a scholarly and highly readable account of the evolution of the Western philosophical tradition beginning with the Greeks and ending in the contemporary postmodern era.

It’s the kind of book that should be basic reading for any program in liberal arts or anyone interested in the history of ideas that have shaped our current worldview. Not only does Tarnas lucidly expound and link together the ideas of the major figures in the Western philosophical tradition but he also locates them within a contextualizing framework, which sees our current time as a transition between different world views.

These are, on the one hand, the scientific, modernist, skeptical, rational paradigm which has been dominant since the sixteenth century and, on the other hand, an emerging postmodern, relational, holistic, participatory paradigm which includes the return and integration of all (especially the feminine) that was repressed in the former patriarchal, colonialist, modernist worldview.

Especially, in lectures eight and nine on the YouTube series, Tarnas presents in brief his overview of the development of Western philosophical thought and the role he sees that that Hillman’s work plays in the current transition to an emerging world view.

Tarnas starts the evolution of philosophical and religious thought in a context in which the self and the world are not differentiated. Both the self and the world of nature are infused with soul and spirit. The self is not apart from the world of nature but intimately connected to it. Tarnas, following Jung, calls this form of consciousness, ‘participation mystique’. Jung wrote:

“Participation mystique is a term derived from Lévy-Bruhl. It denotes a peculiar kind of psychological connection with objects, and consists in the fact that the subject cannot clearly distinguish himself from the object but is bound to it by a direct relationship which amounts to partial identity.”

Tarnas then shows, (to cut a very long story short!), that with the development of Western philosophy and religious modes of thinking – especially the Judeo-Christian tradition of a transcendental, monotheistic God – a different kind of self comes into being – one that defines itself against and sets itself apart from the environment in which it is situated.

This self most clearly emerges in the period of the scientific revolution of the sixteenth century and the subsequent Enlightenment. It is deeply questioning, emancipatory, democratic, skeptical of all traditions, autonomous, assertive and embracing of novelty. Its gifts are the ability to think critically and not take anything – including any authority – for granted, which propels it in the direction of freedom.

However, this self has a darker side, which can be seen in a number of significant ways: in its insistence on the sole validity of knowledge being provided by rationality (“I think, therefore I am”); its belief in its own superiority (and therefore of Western rational, scientific knowledge); its uncritical adoption and assertion of progress; its separation and alienation from nature; and its instrumental view of the environment as being solely containing resources for its own benefit. In short, we are talking about the patriarchal ego – as embodied in both women and men – and the contemporary ecological crisis this self and its worldview have led to.

Beginning around 100 years ago, particularly ushered in by Nietzsche, then followed by Freud, Jung and Hillman in the depth psychology tradition and then the whole subsequent thrust of postmodern philosophy including feminist, ecological and post-colonialist thought, this self centered around the patriarchal ego, and the accompanying paradigm which it both defines and is defined by, has come under siege and been critically deconstructed.

Furthermore, twentieth-century developments in science itself have further eroded the supposedly solid foundations on which this self and its worldview are based. First, in quantum physics, through undermining the scientific principles of objectivity and the dualism of a strict separation between subject and object by showing that the act of observation inevitably effects what is being observed. Secondly, through the sciences of chaos and complexity, which show that the world cannot be adequately understood mechanistically but is inherently uncertain, unpredictable and open-ended.

Tarnas views the effect of this sustained critique, which uncovers, questions and sees through the illusions and pretensions of the Western egoistic self as leading to a decentering, fragmentation and to what he calls a ‘descent’ of the self. Hillman’s work is particularly helpful here as he consistently affirms this descent and embraces the so-called pathological forms it can take, notably depression, as part of the process of soul-making, which the dominant culture has  devalued – preferring the upward movement of spirit to the downward movement of soul.

As the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr says: “The path of descent is the path of transformation. Darkness, failure, relapse, death, and woundedness are our primary teachers, rather than ideas or doctrines.”

Tarnas, influenced  by Stan Grof and his work on non-ordinary states of consciousness, views this descent as a potential death-rebirth process. Two of its accompanying dangers are over-fragmentation of the self and an extreme self-consciousness in which everything is cynically or despairingly seen through and nothing, therefore, has value. (As an aside, it seems to me, from my own experience and talking to others, that marijuana can provoke this disenchanted, hyper self-conscious, somewhat paranoid state, which may be one reason that it is viewed negatively within traditional Shipibo medicine).

This descent, however, can also lead to a return to the original matrix from which the Western Mind emerged in which the self is no longer separate from the world but permeable with and within it. Both self and the cosmos recover their enchantment, and we are able to experience what Hillman calls the anima mundi – that nature and the material world are not inert mechanisms but purposive, beautiful and ensouled.

In his lectures, Tarnas represents this whole process developmentally and diagrammatically as the evolution of a kind of mandala, where the Western mind now returns to the original state of participation mystique – a deep connection and relatedness with nature, which is often identified by anthropologists as the mode of being and thinking of indigenous people before sustained contact with the West.

However, where most commentators see indigenous people existing in this relationship in a largely unconscious way (because they lack the particular egoistic self-consciousness developed in the West), the journey the Western Mind has taken to come back here, to Paradise potentially regained, means we now re-enter this state in a different way.

I find this perspective invaluable in helping further understand my and others experiences with La Madre Ayahuasca. As the use of ayahuasca appears to be rapidly growing in the West, she is  helping facilitate the descent that Tarnas refers to on both an individual and a collective level, and, thus,  helping midwife a new, emergent cosmovision.

Tarnas’ perspective also shows that we cannot help but bring our own cultural paradigms to our experiences with Madre Ayahausaca. We are not like the Shipibo and other indigenous peoples who can enter more easily into the world of spirits and other realities because these realities are so much an intrinsic part of their culture and have been so for millennia.

We, (or at least I), enter these other realities and forms of consciousness with our Western-shaped minds intact and functioning. Whilst La Madre Ayahuasca is profoundly helpful in dissolving our egos and the cultural paradigms which support and are supported by these egos, we also filter and make sense of these experiences through those same cultural paradigms. I don’t think we can go completely native, even if I/we would forever like to escape the limitations  and restriction of our Western egos.

What Madre Ayahuasca can provide us with is this endlessly enriching encounter between our Western world views and the realities that these very same world views have denied and suppressed. Personally, following Hillman and the translation of ayahuasca as the vine of the soul, I tend to understand these realities as belonging to the soul. As Heraclitus said, towards the beginning of Western philosophy:

“You would not find the limits of the soul although you travelled every road: it has so deep a logos.”

The Council of the Elders

I am currently doing a Noyarao dieta with Maestro PapaM. and a group of 13 people on the beach at Zorritos, in North Peru close to the border with Ecuador. We are literally a stone’s throw from the beach. I can hear the sounds of waves pounding all day – and all through the ceremonies. The place we are staying in is decidedly quirky – lots of structures built with large pieces of driftwood – an eco-resort as if it was designed by the art director of the Mad Max movies. A definite post-apocalyptic feel.

Apart from once in Mexico, its the first time I have drunk ayahuasca outside her home in the jungle. Its different. In fact, it took me the all the first ceremony to get used to it. There is an oil rig just on the horizon. I’m told they were five planned but mercifully there is only one. This confirms my feeling that there is nowhere in the world now free from the visible effects of Western industrial development – I think this could be good as it means there is no illusion of escape to a private paradise. We are in this shit together.

Last night was my second ceremony. Actually its the third of the dieta – I arrived one day late because of problems with fog delighting flights at Pucallpa en route to Lima. This is an increasing hazard as the rainy season sets in in the jungle. Here, however, it is desert, like all the coastal strip of Peru. What’s good is that we are close enough to the border with Ecuador for the ocean to be warm here, unlike nearly all the rest of the Peruvian Pacific coast. Mind you, its this cold sea that gives it such fertile abundance and supports the flowering of the wonderful Peruvian gastronomic tradition.

Anyway, back to the dieta. After the first phase of the ceremony had closed last night, around 1am, a group of people were gathered outside talking, I left them to walk up one of the driftwood structures here in the form of a staircase which leads to a circular platform, on which are placed a table and a number of round-backed cast iron chairs. As I approached the table in the half-dark, a bent piece of wood gave the impression of being the back to a huge throne. I sat down at the table and noticed a candle in front of me, protected by a cylindrical transparent plastic sheath to prevent it going out in the wind.

I tried to light the candle with my small lighter twice but gave up as my fingers were getting burnt. I was just about to abandon the project of getting the candle lit altogether when an internal voice told me to keep trying. It was part of my training in perseverance and discipline. On my third attempt, (just like the fairy tales),I managed to get the candle lit.

As I looked around the table and saw the three empty spaces, the idea of a Council of Elders suggested itself to me. The two seats that I had first thought of as a large throne but now could see were separate seats were occupied by my father and James Hillman, two important male figures in my life.

Typically, at this stage, I became distracted, thinking of my goddaughter in England and her parents. Again, the inner voice told me to concentrate. I began a conversation with my father, who passed away five years ago. I am fortunate to have had a father who is essentially a good man. He had his quirks, like all of us, and suffered from a lack of ability to express himself emotionally like nearly all men of his generation, but he was basically loyal, resolute, dutiful, trustworthy, stoical and decent – important and increasingly neglected values.

My great uncle Bill, Mayor of Plympton St. Maurice with his fellow councillors

As I was speaking to him in appreciation of these qualities, and how he had  transmitted them to me, I saw that they did not just originate from him but from his lineage – a long line of male ancestors rooted in the West Country of England, centered around a small village called Plympton St. Maurice in Devon.

I suspect that many of my fathers’ ancestors hailed from the old feudal yeoman class, who were both loyal servants and independent land owners, a form of incipient middle-class.

Moreover, I imagined these ancestors, based near the port of Plymouth, from which Francis Drake sailed to defeat the Spanish Armada in 1588, as strongly connected to the seafaring tradition, involved in the construction of the keels of a new fleet of English galleons by Elizabeth I using the mighty oak trees from the extensive English forests of that time, and more recently joining the royal Devon Yeomanry.

In dieting the Noyarao tree, also known as Palo Volador, (a huge, almost extinct and legendary tree of the Amazon, which merits a blog entry on its own account), I am delighted to feel this connection with the ancient English oak tree. The phrase “Heart of Oak” came strongly to mind, in relation to my father and his ancestors. I have just discovered this is the name of the official march of the English Royal Navy. Here are the first part of the lyrics:

“Come, cheer up, my lads, ’tis to glory we steer,
To add something more to this wonderful year;
To honour we call you, as freemen not slaves,
For who are so free as the sons of the waves?

Chorus:

Heart of oak are our ships, jolly tars are our men,

We always are ready; steady, boys, steady!

We’ll fight and we’ll conquer again and again.”

When my father died and I went to see his body in the funeral parlor just before his cremation, hanging behind his coffin were the lines:

“When the oak is felled

the forest echoes with its fall.

But a hundred acorns are sown silently

by an unnoticed breeze.”

The other seat at the Council of Elders was occupied by James Hillman. Regular readers of this blog know my admiration for him and his work. See, for example, the account I wrote of his memorial service.  I recently finished reading the first part of his biography, ‘The Life and Ideas of James Hillman: Volume 1. The Making of a Psychologist’ by Dick Russell. This is a thoroughly researched and extraordinary work, showing the interplay of Hillman’s life and the development of his thinking in a way that itself illustrates beautifully the idea embodied in Hillman’s most popular book ‘The Soul’s Code’ of the guiding daemon that shapes our lives.

Again, using Jung’s technique of Active Imagination, which I have to say works wonderfully well when combined with the later stages of an ayahuasca ceremony, I expressed my appreciation of James Hillman for his presence and body of work. He looked kindly at me.

I recalled an insight that I had in a ceremony many moons ago. That in my early life, I never had mentors but that later in life, I have been fortunate to be blessed by four – my friend, PapaM, my father, James Hillman, and………….Bob Dylan.

I have always thought that Dylan, in terms of his influence on peoples’ lives, must be one of the most significant figures of the twentieth and twenty first century, more so than all politicians with the possible exceptions of Gorbachev and Nelson Mandela. His early songs, especially, are like Icaros, with their power to evoke emotional response and maybe even healing.

I wondered if I could evoke the presence of Bob Dylan, and suddenly, there he was sitting alongside me at one side of James Hillman and my father.

He looked at me and cocked his hat in that characteristic way, he did both as a young man on the cover of Nashville Skyline, and also more recently when I saw him in concert at Finsbury Park in London just after his seventieth birthday.

All I could do was laugh.

You are what you drink

A couple of days ago I drank half a large bottle of Cusqueña blond beer and later a small bottle of their dark, sweet malt brew. In my opinion, Cusqueña is the best taste of all the different Peruvian beers. It is brewed industrially but its advertising tries to create a sense of a craft-brewed beer linked to the fine artistic traditions of the Incas and other ancient peoples in Peru.

This was the first time I had drank alcohol since coming back from Mexico at the end of July. Not that I had been heavily indulging in my three week stay in Mexico either – just a couple of glasses of good red wine more or less every other night. In August, I did a thirty day dieta, and another ten day dieta at the end of September so drinking alcohol was ruled out for almost three months.

Typically, a ten day dieta has a post dieta period of twenty days without alcohol and sex, and forty days without eating pig. So following the prohibitions of the post-dieta (which despite other, in my view, ill-founded opinions about dietary restrictions being unnecessary) I believe it is important to follow, my post dieta ended on 22nd October and I celebrated with the already mentioned Cusqueñas on the following Saturday

Much as I like good wine, I don’t tend to miss it or drink it in Peru – partly because of the hot, sticky climate which does not make me think of opening a bottle of good claret or burgundy and partly because of the prohibitions on alcohol whilst drinking ayahausca and doing dietas.

I enjoyed the beer. Deliciously cool, tasty and a great complement to the wood-oven cooked pizza in one of the few good restaurants in Pucallpa –  Chez Maggie, (which made it to my list of seven things to like about Pucallpa).

The next day, however, I could feel its effect. Nothing like a hangover, just a subtle but pervasive sense of grogginess and that my energy had been dulled. As a friend said to me: “you can feel its energetic signature”. Whilst I have found that the effects of la Madre Ayahuasca and other healing plants in general have been to wake me up, and each has its particular energetic signature and effect on my body, emotions, mind and spirit, the effect of alcohol is to send me back to sleep.

Because my energetic system was so clear as a result of the dietas I had been doing, I was able to feel and track the effects of the alcohol much more closely.

Actually ‘dulling’ seems the perfect word to use for the effects of alcohol. I don’t think you have to be a conspiracy theorist to see how the anesthetizing, depressing effects of alcohol – it is a depressant after all – function to numb people as to what is happening in the world around them. Put this together with the fact that drugs which expand consciousness are banned and those, like alcohol, which restrict consciousness are promoted, and its easy to see why people like Graham Hancock refer to the war on consciousness.

Additionally, the negative impact on health of alcohol is well-known. A 2011 WHO podcast said that:

“As many as 2.5 million deaths all over the world can be because of alcohol use. Alcohol now is the third leading factor for risk to health and it is a major contributor to deaths and disability.”

Compare this with the fuss caused by the very occasional death from the use of entheogens.

I wrote the above about ten days ago. Since then, I was fortunate to be able to visit Buenos Aires and sample the pleasures of some very good Argentinian wine in restaurants there. But again, I noticed that whilst I loved the taste of the wine and the way it enhanced the food I was eating, the following day I was slightly stupefied. I could see that the place which the path opened up by alcohol led to was flat and uninspiring.

Jackson Pollock at work

Fortunately, I have never been attracted to the addictive qualities of alcohol. I find it hard to see what its benefits are when consumed regularly and in large quantities, though I know there is a tradition of painters and writers who have effectively been alcoholics and produced great works of art – Francis Bacon, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jackson Pollock come to mind.

But now, Madre Ayahuasca is calling me again. As my friend and mentor here says: “Western medicine feels good in the short term but damages you in the long term, whilst indigenous medicine can feel terrible in the short term but leads to healing and well being in the long term.”

Tomorrow I head off early to a Shipibo community downriver where I will be doing another ten day dieta with my Maestro. I suspect that reporting restrictions will be enforced.

Illegal Logging

Throughout this blog I have been wrestling with what is appropriate to communicate in this forum, and what should not be spoken about. As a famous philosopher once wrote: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

Don Machinga

I have had very direct guidance and instructions in my dietas on what I should and what I should not be writing about. In my last but one blog, which tried to stock take of the work I have done with La Madre Ayahuasca over the past nearly four years, I mentioned that Don Machinga had withdrawn from me – partly because I had inappropriately revealed aspects of his world that were best kept private and partly because he is still waiting for me to do something about illegal logging.

In the ceremony after receiving these messages from Don Machinga, when I was doing a long thirty day dieta, I had the idea to ask him what he thought I could do. I have to say that I asked him this in a slightly belligerent tone. His answer to me was in kind: “Don’t ask me, I’m a tree. You’re the human being. You figure it out.”

Since then I have been trying to figure out what I can do about illegal logging. I have spoken to colleagues and friends in Peru about this and also have been reading related material. I have by no means worked this out – and I would be hugely grateful for any suggestions my readers might want to make – but this blog will be an attempt to put together what I have learned so far – partly in a vain attempt to appease Don Machinga, (which is not really that smart a strategy – he’s implacable!) and partly to try and gather my thoughts and ideas about this.

One obvious thing I have done is helped ensure that the organization I work with is using wood from authenticated sustainable sources. This is not so straightforward as it sounds for reasons I hope to make clearer later. One very common reason for not using sustainably harvested wood is that it is more costly. But that is not a good reason.

Part of the problem with capitalism and the environmental crisis is that the true cost of products, including all the environmental costs incurred, are not reflected in the prices, which actually goes against the raison d’être of capitalism as a supposedly efficient and rational market system helping to reduce prices via free and open competition for the benefit of consumers. So, for example, one of the reasons that oil can be relatively cheap is because all the associated costs due to environmental damage (notably carbon emissions) are not reflected in its price but get taken on by society. The technical economic term for these additional costs (or benefits) is ‘externality’.

Likewise wood. Sustainably harvested wood costs more as more care, time, and labor is needed over the management of the forest. The real costs of illegal wood are not factored into its cheaper price. But if an environmentally oriented NGO like the one I work with is not prepared to spend more on legally harvested wood, then, (apart from the obvious incongruence in this), what other organizations are likely to do this?

According to the Greenpeace page on illegal logging, the World Bank has estimated that over 80% of the wood sold in Peru is illegally harvested. An excellent article in National Geographic Magazine from April 2013 entitled “Mahogany’s Last Stand”, states that:

“Illegal logging has all but wiped out Peru’s mahogany. Loggers are turning their chain saws on lesser known species critical to the health of the rain forest………. loggers are now taking aim at other canopy giants few of us have ever heard of—copaiba, ishpingo, shihuahuaco, capirona—which are finding their way into our homes as bedroom sets, cabinets, flooring, and patio decks. These lesser known varieties have even fewer protections than the more charismatic, pricier ones, like mahogany, but they’re often more crucial to forest ecosystems.”

The article goes on to say, about mahogany:

“A single tree can fetch tens of thousands of dollars on the international market by the time its finished wood reaches showroom floors in the United States or Europe. After 2001, the year Brazil declared a moratorium on logging big-leaf mahogany, Peru emerged as one of the world’s largest suppliers.”

This is similar to what happened in Colombia when the US funded the Colombian Government to crack down on jungle labs making cocaine. They simply moved over the border to Peru so that Peru is now the largest producer of cocaine in the world.

A friend told me that some of the logging companies are closely connected to the drug cartels. First, it’s a good way to launder money. Secondly, if they can receive a legitimate concession, it’s the perfect reason to take boat loads of equipment into isolated tributaries in the far jungle, which can then be used to make clandestine cocaine labs,

The relentless search for mahogany has depleted it in all areas apart from indigenous lands, national parks, and territorial reserves set aside to protect isolated tribes, where it can be better protected.

Lupuna – the largest tree in the Rainforest

A further consequence of this is that indigenous communities become embroiled in both the legal and illegal logging business as they seek to make an income out of one of their key resources but more often than not are cheated by the logging companies.

Very recently, another very good article appeared about illegal logging in Peru in the International New York Times. This one is set in Pucallpa (my home town) and has an excellent video accompanying the article.

This article focuses on corruption.

Despite Peru, since 2007, having laws which crack down on illegal logging – brought in as part of the conditions of the Free Trade Agreement with the US – every stage of the process of bringing wood to the market is permeated by corruption. False documents are regularly used to say wood from protected areas has come from other areas and to give other names to the species of protected trees that have been cut down. If this does not work then inspectors and other Government officials are simply bribed. One of the reasons that many people want to become forestry engineers working within the government is that they know they can receive lucrative bribes which will at least triple their salary,

The article and video in the International New York Times tells the story of an environmental prosecutor who is determined to tackle illegal logging but finds obstacles at every turn, even down to when he has finally successfully brought the case to court, when a judge returned the 70 illegal logs to the logger and said:

“How am I going to send a person to jail or put them on trial for 70 little logs if I can see thousands or millions of trees growing here? ”

Logging camp on the banks of the river Ucayali

It is the extensive nature of this corruption and the false papers provided saying that illegally harvested wood comes from a legal source that makes trying to find genuinely sustainable sources of wood here problematic.

So what can be done?

The Greenpeace web page suggests the following:

“There are several solutions to the problem of illegal logging. They include enforcement and creation of international and national laws, as well as independent timber certification companies that work with timber companies to assess and verify the legal, ecological and social sustainability of any timber operation and its wood products.

By exerting influence through the supply chain, governments have enormous power to encourage responsible forest management and reduce the demand for illegally sourced forest products. Government purchases account for a substantial proportion of world trade in timber products.”

 It seems this strategy has worked in Brazil which has succeeded in halting the rate of deforestation in the Amazon. When I asked a friend who worked in forestry how Brazil had managed to achieve this, he said it was by putting significant resources such as detailed satellite tracking and specialized enforcement agencies into the situation. The link cited also emphasizes the importance of creating indigenous and protected areas which now comprise over half of the Brazilian Amazon as well as the role of citizen pressure. So something can be done.

Interestingly, next November/December 2014, Peru is hosting the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The Peruvian Government is proposing that Peru’s contribution to lowering climate emissions will be through stopping further deforestation. This may create the political will and make available the resources to make some impact on this huge problem.

Clearly, there is no simple, easily implementable solution. As the informative website ‘Illegal Logging Portal’ says:

“The diversity of situations – both with respect to causes and impacts – means that there is no easy solution to illegal logging. Focusing only on enforcement of the law is not usually a solution, as this can reinforce corrupt networks or increase poverty amongst some forest users. Rather, multi-faceted approaches adapted to the particular situation are necessary to help ensure that outcomes are equitable and will be sustained in the long-term.”

One final comment on this issue returns me to Don Machinga where this blog post started. Nearly all arguments against deforestation and illegal logging emphasize the potentially disastrous effects to human life of these activities – more carbon emissions, more soil erosion, more risk of landslides and floods, more social conflict, greater institutional corruption,  loss of government revenue, and loss of biodiversity that could be useful for humans in the area of future medical treatments and cures.

These reasons, of course, are important. But they are very anthropocentric. Environmental ethics and deep ecology stress the intrinsic value of all life forms irrespective of their human utility. Experience with La Madre Ayahuasca adds another dimension to this.

La Madre has been called a facilitator of inter-species communication. Especially during dieta, she enables us to have contact with the spirit – or, in less theological language, the ‘active intelligence’ – of the plant or tree. If we are fortunate, these experiences grace us with a glimpse of the extraordinarily rich, vast, sacred world of the large trees – as represented in the painting above of the world of the almost extinct tree noyarao and also in many of the artworks of Pablo Amaringo.

So what does it mean that we are destroying these worlds, these other exquisite spiritual realities, not just the material life of the tree? I don’t have an answer to this but I think it more than bears considering.

The Shipibo

What follows may be controversial. It is important that it is read in the double context of:

i) The two previous blogs I have written about  the colonization of the Americas and their history before 1491 which shapes the background for what is written here

ii) The love and respect I have for my Shipibo Maestro and his family as well as the affection I feel for Maestra A. and her family, (who I wrote about here). The strong, bright light they shine, and I know there are others like them, throws the shadow into relief.

Introduction

The Shipibo are one of the largest and most well-known indigenous peoples in the Peruvian Amazon. It is difficult to know their exact numbers but population estimates generally put them between 35,000 and 38,000 people.

They still live mainly in rural communities along the river Ucayali and its tributaries, up and down river from Pucallpa. Increasingly, in common with indigenous people all over the world, they are emigrating to the cities. Pucallpa (that is to say Yarinacocha, its largely indigenous part) has a substantial Shipibo population and there is now a sizeable Shipibo presence in Lima as people go there to find work.

(For a short Peruvian news program about the Shipibos in the community of Cantagallo in Lima, click here.)

Ayahuasca plays an important part in traditional Shipibo culture. Some would locate La Madre Ayahuasca at the heart of the culture. People coming to drink ayahausca in Peru and wanting to work with indigenous shamans are most likely to work with Shipibos.

Additionally, as shown in the photo, their intricate designs and artwork have become part of the burgeoning global ayahuasca culture.

Many foreigners coming to Peru and working with the Shipibo for the first time tend to idealize them – assuming they have a good experience, which unfortunately is happening less.

I recently came across the following introductory passage about the Shipibo posted on a Facebook site called Ayahuasca the Teacher Plant.

“The Shipibos are a very mysterious and fascinating people. Even in the turmoil of the 21st century, many of them keep a strong attachment to their culture and their philosophy of life, cultivating their traditions with attention and care. Proud, diffident, smiling, welcoming, strong, extremely sensitive, friendly and centred.”

This is indeed part of the story. At the risk of being politically incorrect, but in order to promote a more complex picture of the Shipibo – and in this way, I think, to actually do them more justice – they can also be prone to envy and back-stabbing. On the theme of envy, much of the witchcraft practiced is explained in terms of envidia – ‘envy’. Interestingly, Melanie Klein, the influential child psychoanalyst, also understood human behavior in two broad terms , which became the title of her major book – ‘Envy and Gratitude’.

Additionally, in my experience, most Shipbo are accomplished liars – for example, overpricing work materials so they can pocket the difference, saying it is their birthday when it is not to obtain gifts, lying to their community that they are not receiving money for work carried out when they are, saying they need money to buy medicines for a sick relative…….. etc, etc. They have become adept at getting what they want out of – on many occasions that means cheating – non-indigenous organizations such as NGO’s (non-profits). In short, they have human vices, which take particular, distinctive forms in their culture as they do in all human societies.

I have written before about some of the challenges of working with the Shipibo, which are common to many tribal people all over the world. In this earlier post, I focused on the clash between Western project planning methods and indigenous cultural reality. I want to extend this analysis here.

History

Firstly, it has to be recognized that the encounter between any non-indigenous person and the Shipibo occurs in a historical and cultural context marked by over 500 years of brutal colonization of the Shipibo and other indigenous Amazonian peoples – first by the Spanish, followed by continuing exploitation and discrimination by the mestizo and European population of Peru, and now by transnational companies. (For a beautifully written and meticulously researched account of the history of colonization in the Americas see Eduardo Galeano’s trilogy ‘Memory of Fire’ which I wrote about previously).

A Peruvian friend who grew up with indigenous people once said to me: “Indigenous people just don’t like white people”. (And with reason.) It seems highly naive to me, and a convenient denial of political history and cultural reality, to take the attitude of a young American I met who said: “Well I have not personally exploited any indigenous person so I don’t feel to blame for this. I just want to be friends.”

In this context of savage colonization and vicious exploitation, the Shipibo have learned to survive. Like many colonized people, as documented by Fritz Fanon, they have become skilled at identifying and displaying to the colonizer the face the colonizer wants to see, whilst showing one another a very different face. This often leads Westerners who get beyond the initial honeymoon period and over-romanticization of Shipibos to describe them as “two-faced”.

(There is an excellent video by Jerónimo M. Muñoz, a Spanish film-maker, describing exactly this process of Westerners first falling in love with and then becoming disillusioned with the Shipibo.)

In Western culture, this idealized and over-sentimentalized notion of indigenous people expressed in the concept of the ‘noble savage’ has a long history going back to its first mention in 1672 in a play by John Dryden and often attributed to the French political philosopher Rousseau.

Largely due to their strategic location on the riverbanks, the Shipibo have always been known for their capacity to trade and engage with the dominant powers in the region, going back at least some say to the Incas, and, importantly, to not let themselves be fully subjugated in the process.

They are a resourceful people. There are stories that in the times of the rubber boom between 1897 and 1912, when the most appalling slavery was inflicted on indigenous people, the Shipibo protected themselves by hunting and rounding up other tribes and leaving them in cages on the riversides for the rubber barons so that, in return, they would be left alone.

Non-Profits and the Shipibo

It has been interesting, frustrating and often amusing (the sanest response) for me to see over time, (and I’m still learning), how many Shipibo deal with non-profit organizations wanting to implement international development projects. For the Shipibo, ‘projects’ have come to mean money in their pockets. In the past, even sixty years ago, money was not strictly necessary – nature provided everything in abundance.

However, as the Shipibo emigrate to the city and want better educational opportunities for their children and consumer goods, and therefore need money, they increasingly enter the global money market economy.

A friend, who has directed a non-profit working in this area for many years, said to me: “I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been ripped off by the Shipibo”. They have become extremely good at this. It is common knowledge, for example, that some Shipibos take money from campaigning non-profits to fight against the arrival of oil companies in their territories whilst at the same time taking money from the same oil companies to open the doors to them.

The experience of being cheated is one reason that some non-profits quickly stop working with the Shipibos  – thus further fueling the vicious circle where the Shipibo think that the non-profits will only be here for a short while so its best to take maximum advantage of them whilst they are here, which means that the non-profits feel abused and decide to leave, which proves to the Shipibos that the non-profits are only present for the short-term and should be exploited even more, which means…….  etc. etc.

It is, of course, possible to work with the Shipibo. But it requires a long term commitment which can be difficult when funding bodies want to see short-term results.

Money and the Shipibo

The Shipibo have a different attitude to money. Two people, including the Director of the non-profit quoted earlier, who have had long term involvement with the Shipibo, have made the same comment to me in relation to taking money for themselves that: “I don’t think for them they see it as stealing”.

Deforestation to create cattle ranches

I think this is for a number of reasons. It’s partly because the attitude that foreign and National Peruvian aid organizations are there for the taking has become embedded in Shipibo culture – we are fair game. Now that the traditional hunting of fish and animals, which provided a key and nutritious food intake in the past, has almost been destroyed by deforestation, contamination and large-scale extractive industries perpetuated by non-indigenous people, why not hunt money with the same cunning and skill that is needed to fish and hunt animals?

It’s partly resulting from a view promoted by the second Alan Garcia government of 2006-2011 that people from non-profits are using indigenous people to get money to line their own pockets. This further fuels the Shipibos’ feeling that they are owed something and justifies using those same non-profits for personal and immediate family rather than community benefit.

It’s partly too because Shipibos think differently about money. In fact, they think differently about many things and in different ways. In an excellent article called ‘Archaic Man’ written in 1931, C.G. Jung investigates the differences between Western and indigenous (what he, reflecting the prejudices of the time, calls ‘archaic’) ways of thinking.

His basic point is that both Western and indigenous systems of thought have their own logic. They start with different assumptions. What Western thought typically attributes to chance or natural and perceptible cause (as exemplified in theories of illness, for example), indigenous thought attributes to the actions of spirits and the invisible world (bad spirits causing illness).

The assumed superiority of the Western worldview is deeply engrained in the Western psyche, although La Madre Ayahuasca is working flat out to overturn this and show us the reality of the invisible world, which has long been known to indigenous peoples.

A significant reason that Westerners feel attracted to the Shipibo is that they live in the ‘now’. They don’t need Eckhart Toll exhorting them to do this. Relating this to the theme of money, it means they spend it when they have it.

They tend not to save, which is a future-oriented perspective, with the result that they are always in need of money because it is immediately spent – especially because many Shipibo have, feel strongly connected to, and support large extended families in which there will always be need for money.

Two important caveats.

i) I am writing mainly about the Shipibo who have sustained contact with Westerners. Clearly, within this group, there are important individual exceptions. I would suggest the hypothesis, (which would be challenging to test!), that the more contact individual Shipibos have had with white society, the more likely they are to be corrupted.

This indicates how profoundly toxic Western materialist culture is on every level for indigenous peoples: physically destroying their natural environment via large-scale, extractive industries; ruining their health through the aggressive marketing of Western fast food; mentally conditioning people to Western modes of thinking; emotionally creating a sense of inferiority; and spiritually undermining and denigrating their traditional cosmovision.

(As a relevant aside, I met someone recently who had not been back to Pucallpa since she first drank ayahausca thirteen years ago in Yarina. She was distressed at how much the overall vibe in Yarina had changed for the worse. Now, in relation to ayahuasca, it is much more commercial and predatory.)

ii) I’m talking primarily about Shipibo men who occupy nearly all positions of leadership and authority in the communities and indigenous political organizations – although, thankfully, this is now changing – and who are the people that tend to deal with non-profits.

One of my colleagues says to me we should only work with women and children, as they are the future and less corrupted by patriarchal ideas. She has a point.

Mind you, the same could be said of many places in the world.

Taking Stock

At the end of December this year, it will be four years since I started drinking ayahuasca. My introduction to La Madre Ayahuasca was at the Temple of the Way of Light, in Iquitos, Peru which involved drinking ayahuasca in seven ceremonies over twelve days.

I am grateful to the Shipibo Maestr@s and all the staff at the Temple of the Way of Light for facilitating a safe and powerful entry into La Madre’s world. Living in Yarina (the indigenous part of Pucallpa in the Peruvian Amazon), I increasingly hear stories of neglect and abuse – financial, sexual and emotional – by so-called shamans. The Temple of the Way of Light provides a secure and strong container for people’s initial experience with La Madre.

For some reason, now seems a good time to take stock of my nearly four-year journey with La Madre.

As I continued to to drink ayahuasca in further workshops at the Temple of the Way of Light, over the period of a year, I had some extraordinary and powerful experiences, which opened me to new worlds and other realities. I have now come to think that what La Madre does is to give us glimpses of her world, which then provide the encouragement and motivation to keep going when the going gets difficult. And normally, it does get rough. It’s like any relationship in which the honeymoon period or the first flushes of falling in love can later provide an important reference point and reminder when the reality and challenges of the relationship begins to bite.

As I wrote once before, anyone who thinks drinking ayahuasca is a short-cut or false means to obtain enlightenment, is talking out of prejudice and/or ignorance. As my friend Ian Driscoll wrote in his blog about his experience of dieta and the seemingly endless miserable retching and vomiting that he experienced:

 “If anyone tells you that ayahuasca is just a recreational drug, and simply another form of escapism, feel free to give them my contact information.”

The serious work with La Madre really began when I started to do dietas. For a really good article on what a dieta is, click here. The main purpose of a dieta, in which a palo (a plant or tree) is imbibed in liquid form (with one notable exception), is to make contact with the spirit of the palo and receive whatever the palo offers.

I have to admit I was somewhat skeptical about this at first. My academic training and fifty odd years of being immersed in the dominant rational, materialistic culture did not leave much room for plant spirits. But then as Jeremy Narby has commented: “Drinking ayahuasca is a profound challenge to the Western paradigm.”

My first ten-day dieta was in November 2012. There are many different ways and traditions of doing dietas. The people I work with offer ceremonies every other night of dieta, and the palo is usually drank at last twice on the nights when there are not ceremonies. There are strong food and behavioral restrictions on dietas, again which vary according to the specific tradition, but generally include no red meat, no dairy products, no fruit, no bread, no oil, no salt, no alcohol, no sugar and no sex.

After a ten-day dieta there is usually a twenty-day post dieta which involves no sex, alcohol and pig (for two months). This often generates amusing and/or disturbing fantasies (according to your taste) of breaking the dieta in three ways simultaneously by getting drunk and making love to a pig.

The flower of chiricsanango

My first dieta was with chiricsanango. My Maestro had recommended this to me a few months before as he had diagnosed potential rheumatism in my body. Chiricsanango is very good for the overall strengthening of the central nervous system and is often recommended as a first dieta as it provides a strong platform for further dietas.

On my first dieta, I don’t think I ever experienced such strong ceremonies. I was besieged by apocalyptic imagery, which I have written about before. But the primary revelation for me was to strongly experience the presence of chiricsanango. This was a very friendly, accompanying, companionable presence, which I felt physically very close to me.

Additionally, the chiricsanango gave me great clarity and helped to slow down and make it much easier to navigate the chaos of the onset of the mareación. A further effect of chiricsanango for most people is to have vivid, and therefore more easily recalled, dreams.

Since that first dieta, I have done five other ten-day dietas – twice with Don Machinga, once with Bobinsana, once with Bobinsana and Chiricsanango combined, once with Noyarao – and one recent thirty-day dieta with ayahuma. One thing I have learned from these dietas is that the plant spirits really do not like me writing about my experience and conversations with them in this blog.

Don Machinga, especially, has mostly withdrawn from me – partly because he was angry that in my very first blog entry, I revealed intimate details of his world and partly because he is waiting for me to do something about illegal logging. This relates to the point Steve Beyer makes in his excellent book ‘Singing to the Plants’ (to my mind the best book currently available about ayahuasca) in which he says that contact with the spirits, like any relationship, entails reciprocity and mutual obligations.

I surprised myself by working out that over the last year, I have spent a quarter of the year on dieta. The interesting thing is that I never planned to do this. The process happened naturally – one dieta unfolded into another. My friend and mentor here says that dietas are where the real work gets done – that is deep, intense and sustained healing.

So, taking stock, what have been the overall effects of these dietas?

Before answering that, I first want to make a general comment about how Madre Ayahuasca has effected me. For the first fifty years of my life, when I lived in England, I suffered from anxiety, depression and insomnia. This became particularly acute in my thirties and forties. I spent twelve years in therapy and training in body-based Reichian bioenergetic psychotherapy, three years in Gestalt therapy, and one year in Jungian analysis. This all helped but never seemed to fully resolve the problem.  

An important step in overcoming these personal issues was my decision at the age of 50 to leave England and move to live and work in Mexico at which point I started to feel much better. This confirmed for me James Hillman’s view that the problems we suffer do not reside solely in our individual psyche, or, better put, that our psyche and that of the world and culture we live in are continuous. (As an aside, for an interesting discussion of this, have a look at Ian Driscoll’s latest blog about the psychological effects of being back in California for a few months after living in Peru for a year.)

I think all the therapy that I did was useful in that it gave me tools to work with La Madre Ayahuasca and for her to work with me. I think she uses whatever tools, channels and resources people have available – for some people it can be meditation, for others yoga, martial arts, painting, poetry and/or music.

However, La Madre Ayahausca has helped me reach parts of my being that I had never really touched before. For example, I realized that my birth had been deeply traumatic. I knew this intellectually and even emotionally before but in ceremony I experienced it on a deep somatic level. As a result, I had made a decision to not fully incarnate into my body. The trauma also led me to reject the love my mother offered me, which is an interesting reversal of the standard psychological doctrine of seeing ourselves as victims of our parents.

In short, La Madre helped hugely to heal myself of the anxiety and its accompanying symptoms, which had plagued me for so many years. It seems there is growing evidence of her efficacy in dealing with anxiety, panic and depression – as well as in many other areas like the healing of many physical illnesses and the treatment of addictions.

So back to the question about my dietas.

For the last six months or so in the dietas that I have done, I have felt that I am in boot-camp with La Madre Ayahuasca. She is patiently teaching me focus and concentration. I am a slow learner and in her remedial class, which is a relief after having all my life been in the top class.

She is also slowly showing me the differences between what are the products of my mind and what is genuinely ’other’ – though the dividing line here is not sharp. Furthermore, the dietas have been very powerful in the overall cleansing of my body and psyche. I have had relatively few visions or even insights in this time. She once said to me that the time for visions is not now. The work is cleansing and concentration which leads to being present.

I have had many ceremonies now in the past year where my rational, left-brained mind thinks afterwards that nothing much has happened. Yet, as always, the ceremonies are enormously stimulating and I rarely sleep afterwards. I’m writing this now at 4am after returning from a ceremony, finding that I could not sleep and that the words for this blog began to form spontaneously in my mind.

What I notice is that – even if I am not having visions or transcendental experiences, like I used to – I am more confident, assertive, creative, energetic, embodied and productive than I have ever been in my life. La Madre is helping me live more fully in this world, which seems the point to me of a human existence. Plus, at my best, I can let life flow more easily. Being anxious and a Capricorn to boot, I have always had a tendency to plan and control. Now I find I can use this capacity, which has its benefits, alongside being more receptive to what life is presenting me. I am less forcing and more responsive.

I seem to have acquired an inner strength, which was always latent but is now more manifest. I feel both more empathic with others and at the same time less overwhelmed by others’ feelings. My ideas and intuitions flow more easily into actions.

I can only conclude with a deep sense of gratitude for the work with La Madre Ayahuasca, all the friends I have met and made on this path, and in particular for my two teachers.

Recommended Reading for Dietas 3. “One-Handed Basket Weaving” – Poems on the Theme of Work by Rumi

Rumi dancers Reza Sepahdari

At the last moment I threw this book of poems by Rumi into my rucksack, along with the seven other books I had decided to take to my thirty day dieta. My friends keep advising me to buy a Kindle. I can see it would make traveling much lighter, but I like the feel of a book in my hands. I like physically turning the pages.

This is a collection of poems by Rumi (1207-1273), the great Sufi teacher and mystic, translated by Coleman Barks and selected by him from the Mathnawi,  Rumi’s six volume masterpiece that he wrote in the last twelve years of his life.

I have to say, too, that to my mind, Coleman Barks is by far and away the best translator of Rumi. He manages to use a mixture of contemporary and ancient language in a way that deeply honors the spirit of the poems and gives the poems an eternally present feel.

One of the advantages of the internet is that it makes people accessible. I tracked down his publisher’s site and wrote to Coleman Barks expressing my appreciation for his work in translating the poems in this collection. He replied: “I love that book too.  It got put together by something other than my ego.”

I already knew many of the poems in this collection. I had found consolation in the book in the darkest of days fifteen or so years ago when I was struggling with my work as a management consultant. At that time, the following poem was particularly meaningful.

The City of Saba

Once in the city of Saba

there was a glut of wealth.

Everyone had more than enough.

Even the bath-stokers wore gold belts.

Huge grape clusters hung down

on every street and brushed the faces

of the citizens. No one had to do

anything.

                You could balance

an empty basket on your head and walk

through any orchard, and it would fill

by itself with overripe fruit

dropping into it.

                           Stray dogs strayed

in lanes full of thrown-out scraps

with barely a notice.

                                 The lean desert wolf

got indigestion from the rich food.

Everyone was fat and satiated

with all the extra.

                             There were no robbers.

There was no energy for crime,

or for gratitude.

                          And no one wondered

about the unseen world. The people of Saba

felt bored with just the mention of prophecy.

They had no desire of any kind. Maybe

Some idle curiosity about miracles,

but that was it.

                         This over-richness

is a subtle disease. Those who have it

are blind to what’s wrong, and deaf

to anyone who points it out.

                                               The city of Saba

can not be understood from within itself!

But there is a cure,

an individual medicine,

not a social remedy:

                                 Sit quietly, and listen

for a voice within that will say,

                                                 Be more silent.

As that happens,

                           your soul starts to revive.

Give up talking, and your positions of power.

Give up the excessive money.

                                              Turn towards the teachers

and the prophets who don’t live in Saba.

They can help you grow sweet again

and fragrant and wild and fresh

and thankful for any small event.

Writing that poem out now, it feels extraordinary. I can’t think of a better critique of contemporary capitalism.

During the dieta, I slowly read the poems in this book three times – it’s quite a short book! (128 pages). Like all good poetry, each time I read the poem I saw something different in it.

In some of the ceremonies, the poems would return to me and, hopefully this will not sound overly pretentious or aggrandizing,  I understood, (or better said), I saw more clearly,  their spiritual truth.

For example, and bear with me whilst I quote the first half of another poem:

The King’s Falcon

The king had a noble falcon,

who wandered away one day,

and into the tent of an old woman,

who was making dumpling stew

for her children.

                          “Who’s been taking care

of you?”, she asked, quickly tying

the falcon’s foot.

                          She clipped

his magnificent wings and cut

his fierce talons and fed him straw.

                                                          “Someone

who doesn’t know how to treat falcons,”

she answered herself,

                                   “but your mother knows!”

Friend, this kind of talk is a prison.

Don’t listen!

                   The king spent all day

looking for his falcon, and came at last

to that tent and saw his fine raptor

standing on a shelf in the smoky steam

of the old women’s cooking.

                                             “You left me

for this?”

             The falcon rubbed his wings

against the king’s hand, feeling wordlessly

what was almost lost.

                                    This falcon is one who,

through grace, gets to sit close to the king,

and so thinks he’s on the same level

as the king.

                  Then he turns his head for a moment,

and he’s in the old woman’s tent.

Don’t feel special

in the king’s presence.

be mannerly and thankful

and very humble.

A falcon is an image of that part of you

that belongs with the king.

I have lost count of the number of times I have ‘turned my head’ in ceremonies and found myself back in the old women’s tent. Thankfully, La Madre Ayahausca is very forgiving.

The first four of the last six lines are the best advice you could get about how to approach La Madre Ayahuasca.

It’s going to be hard not to include every poem. Best to get hold of the book yourself. Here is one more poem which I think expresses beautifully that feeling that sometimes come to all of us at the end of a ceremony:

This We have Now

This we have now

is not imagination.

This is not

grief or joy.

Not a judging state,

or an elation

or sadness.

Those come

and go.

This is the presence

that doesn’t.

It’s dawn, Husam,

here in the splendor of coral,

inside the Friend, the simple truth

of what Hallaj said.

What else could human beings want?

When grapes turn to wine,

they’re wanting

this.

When the nightsky pours by,

it’s really a crowd of beggars,

and they all want some of this!

This

that we are now

created the body, cell by cell,

like bees building a honeycomb.

The human body and the universe

grew from this, not this

from the universe and the human body.

And just to show that Rumi was way ahead of the film ‘The Matrix’ and that furthermore, whilst optimistic, he is not peddling any kind of wishy washy, new-age philosophy, but has an uncompromising fierceness:

The Dream That Must be Interpreted

This place is a dream.

Only a sleeper considers it real.

Then death comes like dawn,

and you wake up laughing

at what you thought was your grief.

But there’s a difference with this dream.

Everything cruel and unconscious

done in the illusion of the present world,

all that does not fade away at the death-waking.

It stays

and it must be interpreted.

All the mean laughing,

all the quick, sexual wanting, those torn coats of Joseph,

they change into powerful wolves

that you must face.

The retaliation that sometimes comes now,

the swift, payback hit,

is just a boy’s game

to what the other will be.

You know about circumcision here.

It’s full castration there!

And this groggy time we live,

this is what it’s like:

                               A man goes to sleep in the town

where he has always lived, and he dreams he’s living

in another town.

                          In the dream, he doesn’t remember

the town he’s sleeping in his bed in. He believes

the reality of the dream-town.

This world is that kind of sleep.

Well worth thinking about what are “those torn coats of Joseph” that we each wear.

Finally, to conclude, two short passages from poems that could be the best advice you will ever receive.

1. From ‘Humble and Active’:

The saying, Whatever God wills will happen,

does not end, “Therefore be passive.”

Rather, it means, Forget yourself,

and get ready to help.

2. Turning Towards Kindness

Anyone who genuinely and constantly with both hands

looks for something, will find it.

Though you are lame and bent over, keep moving

toward the Friend. With speech, with silence,

with sniffing about, stay on the track.

Whenever some kindness comes to you, turn

that way, towards the source of kindness.

Love-things originate in the ocean.

Restlessness leads to rest.

Recommended Reading for Dietas 2. ‘1491: the Americas before Colombus’

In my last post I wrote about the trilogy of books ‘Memory of Fire’ by Eduardo Galeano that I recently read on my thirty day dieta. In this post, I write about the fourth book I read on the dieta related to the history of the Americas called ‘1491: The Americas before Columbus’ by Charles C. Mann, published in 2005. This book has justifiably been well praised.

Charles Mann sets out to describe North, Central and South America before the arrival of Columbus in 1491. His basic thesis is that we have been taught an erroneous history of the continent, which persists today, and ignores the substantial new findings over the last twenty year in archeology, anthropology and historical studies, supported by other disciplines such as genetics, climatology, demography, soil science, and molecular biology .

In the book, he gives the reader a well-written and entertaining account of these studies. These studies indicate that in contrast to the convenient myth which has been perpetrated that Columbus and other early explorers arrived in a land that was almost pure wilderness and scarcely populated – which therefore meant it could be expropriated – there were already and previously existing large, complex, well-populated societies with rich traditions and cultures.

For example, the city of Tenochtitlan (the former name of Mexico City) was larger when Hernán Cortés arrived than any European city. The Spaniards were astounded at its size, location and construction. It was built on mostly artificial islands in the center of a mountain lake, linked to the shore by four long causeways.

Equally, it has been estimated, though this remains controversial in academic circles, that, in 1491, the Central Mexican plateau had a population of 25.2 million and was, at the time, the most heavily populated region of the planet, with more than twice as many people per square mile than China or India.

Dobyns, an anthropologist turned historical demographer, argued that the pre-Columbus population of the Americas was between 90 and 112 million people. Previous estimates had been between 1 and 8.4 million inhabitants. As Mann says (p.94): “Another way of saying this is that when Columbus sailed more people lived in the Americas than in Europe.”

Through carefully going through the recent studies – and examining the considerable controversy they have provoked within the academic world, the environmental movement and the indigenous activist movement – Mann demonstrates that our conception of the continent has been skewed. As a child growing up in England in the late fifties and sixties, I can now recognize the implicit racism and promotion of the superiority of white culture that was being promulgated by the traditional teaching about the history of the Americas.

Secotan Indians’ dance in North Carolina, watercolor by John White, 1585

One of the passages I like best in the book is when Mann is describing the arrival of the first English colonists in New England. He shows how the English newcomers entered a complex web of alliances and feuds between the different native people of that region, and how one particular tripartite alliance of indigenous federations was aiming to use the English against their enemies. In a startling reversal of normal imagery, he says (p.44):

“Time and time again Europeans described the People of the First Light as strikingly healthy specimens. Eating an incredibly nutritious diet, working hard but not broken by toil, the people of New England were taller and more robust than those who wanted to move in……….Because famine and epidemic disease had been rare in the Dawnland, its inhabitants had none of the pox scars or rickety limbs common on the other side of the Atlantic.”

And on (p. 46) that:

“Europeans, Indians told other Indians, were physically weak, sexually untrustworthy, atrociously ugly and just plain smelly. (The British and French, many of whom had not taken a bath in their entire lives, were amazed by the Indian interest in personal cleanliness.)”

Throughout ‘1491′, the familiar patterns of conquest and forced subservience indicated in Galeano’s Memory of Fire’ are present. Additionally, Mann introduces a factor that he claims is indispensable in understanding how small groups of conquistadores  – Cortés in Mexico only had 600 men (400 soldiers and 200 Indian porters), six cannon and 15 horses and Pizarro in Peru only 168 men and 62 horses – were able to subjugate the vast empires of the Aztecs (more correctly called the Triple Alliance) and the Incas respectively – smallpox.

Mann argues that it was the introduction of European diseases that devastated Indian populations and cultures, making them vulnerable to conquest, and, moreover, which created the impression of a sparsely populated country. Dobyns estimates that European diseases, such as first smallpox (which arrived before the Spaniards) then later typhus, influenza, diphtheria and measles, killed nine out of ten people in the Inca empire.

In another striking passage in the book, when Mann refers to what he calls ‘Holmberg’s Mistake’ – the influential attribution in 1950 by an anthropologist of a primitive state of existence to a group of 150 Sirionó Indians in the Beni region of Eastern Bolivia (which then became the established view of many so-called ‘primitive’ peoples)  – he says (p.9) :

“The wandering people Holmberg travelled with in the forest had been hiding from their abusers. At some risk to himself, Holmberg tried to help them, but he never fully grasped that the people he saw as remnants from the paleolithic age were actually the persecuted survivors of a recently shattered culture. It was as if he had come across refugees from a Nazi concentration camp, and concluded that they had always been barefoot and starving.”

Mann’s argument, too, is that these complex pre-Columbian societies throughout the Americas actively managed their natural environments. He uses the examples of the Plains Indians who were constantly setting fire to vast areas of their habitat, thus making it more amenable for human habitation and agriculture, whilst also at the same time encouraging ecological regeneration.

Route of Francisco de Orellana

Likewise, in the Amazon, there is increasing evidence that what the Spanish adventurer Francisco de Orellana (wonderfully portrayed by Klaus Kinski in Herzog’s film ‘Aguirre Wrath of God’ loosely based on this expedition) saw, and his scribe Gaspar de Carvajal, a member of the Dominican Order, recorded, when they journeyed the length of the Amazon in 1541, was not made up, as has generally been thought. It seems that heavily populated villages did exist along considerable lengths of the Amazon basin. These populations were supported by the sophisticated agricultural practices of terra preta  – the creation of rich, fertile soil through mixing charcoal and ceramic shards. Amazonian topsoil, without this admixture, is usually of notoriously poor quality and easily washed away despite supporting such extraordinary biodiversity.

In this way, continues Mann, we have to correct the myth of the Americas in 1491 and beforehand as a pristine wilderness. He points out that the environmental movement which, following Thoreau, has wanted to promote the idea of nature in its pure, wild state and conserve it that way, has found these studies disturbing, because they see that it can provide a pathway and rationale for further development of the last untouched places on the planet, such as areas of the Amazon.

I think, however, that the key point is what kind of development is being promoted. It is increasingly clear – though you would not think so listening to most politicians – that the traditional, large-scale, extractive model of development is morally bankrupt and ecologically destructive, even if it is still alive and kicking.

Helicopters at Pucallpa airport

As I write this, seated on my hotel balcony in Pucallpa in the heart of the Peruvian Amazon,  helicopters are flying overhead as oil companies move in to explore for oil in traditional Shipibo territories in the Ucayali and Loreto regions.

These communities, up until now, have mercifully escaped exploration and production with the notable exception of two Shipibo communities near Contamana (between Pucallpa and Iquitos on the river Ucayali) where the effects of 40 years of oil company activity have been disastrous – these communities no longer have fresh drinking water nor easy access to fishing due to oil pollution and the people suffer a wide variety of medical problems which have been unequivocally linked to exposure to crude oil.

What is needed as an alternative to the traditional neo-liberal model of development are other forms of development, such as permaculture, which are based on working with nature and the possibility that in a partnership between humans and nature, both can be enriched, rather than nature being just a resource to be appropriated for human needs, and in the case of many corporations, human greed.

‘1491’ is an important book because it shows us that historically many pre-Columbian societies were able to exist based on this kind of cooperative relationship with nature – and where they exceeded or ruined the ability of the surrounding eco-systems to sustain them, they have disappeared – as Jared Diamond argued about the collapse of societies like the Mayas, the Greenland Norse, and Easter Island amongst others. Many people see this as a warning for what as a species we are now doing to the whole planet.