Doing Dieta – two additional rules

Bobinsana

My friend Papamiki (one of the few Western Maestros who really merits the name) consistently says that doing dietas is the royal road to deepening the therapeutic work with Madre Ayahausca.

Actually, he does not use that particular expression – I borrowed it from Freud who famously talked about dreams being the “royal road to the unconscious”. Papamiki also points out that most of the well-known writers in the ayahuasca world have never done dietas. I don’t know how he knows this but he’s usually right.

Aliens landing!

I love this cartoon. It says it all.

Three Visits to the Mosquito Spirit King

A friend recently sent me a quote from page one of a book called “Understanding Gregory Bateson; Mind, Beauty and the Sacred Earth” (New York, State University of NY Press, Albany, 2008) by Noel G. Charlton.  The passage is so good I’m going to reproduce it all here.

Trapped!

“…the experience of the self is always a defeat for the ego” C.J. Jung

Ego Dissolves by Coyote Johnnie

In my last post, I listed six writers whose work is useful in helping to understand aspects of the experience with Madre Ayahuasca.

One of the key themes that each of these writers is exploring is the relationship between the ego and what can be variously called – depending on one’s spiritual discipline, theoretical orientation,  and/or personal preferences – the right brain hemisphere, larger psyche, higher self, creative imagination, anima mundi, God, the numinous, Gods and Goddesses, oversoul, underworld, otherworld, spirit world etc.

In this post, I want to approach this same theme of the restricted nature of ego consciousness by using a more personal voice – that of a piece of writing I did in January this year.

The Map is Not the Territory…….…but Maps can be Useful

Given that most Westerners experience with Madre Ayahuasca is deeply challenging to the rationalist, cultural frameworks we have typically been brought up in, how do we then understand these experiences? What kind of frameworks might be useful for us to help us make sense of the strange experiences we are having?

What is Madre Ayahuasca’s Favourite Football Team?

Recently, I was in full swing with Madre Ayahuasca. I had gone through an increasingly familiar initial phase of seeing how my thoughts could create all kinds of realities – most of them like a bad B-movie dredged up from trashy images from my subconscious.

As I passed through this phase, everything became increasingly multi-leveled and chaotic. Suddenly, in the midst of this chaos, apparently completely unrelated to what was going on, I heard Madre Ayahuasca’s voice telling me that her favorite football team was Liverpool.

The Many Faces of Madre Ayahuasca

Since I first met her just over three years ago, Madre Ayahuasca has appeared to me in a number of guises. I first knew her as an old crone with a face full of warts. I subsequently realized she was appearing to me this way because I had been rude about her in an article I had written, which, following a description I had found, compared her taste to that of “being produced by boiling a toad and putting it in a blender”.

Initial Conversations with Don Machinga

I first properly met Don Machinga in the late evening of Thursday 31st January 2013. Maestro G., who knew him well, had introduced me to him briefly for each of the four previous days, but the real meeting occurred that night.

His presence was huge, powerful, and formidable but not threatening. He filled the space. I was an ant in comparison. One of the first things he told me, once I had adjusted to the scale of his presence, was that he wanted to be an ally in the work I am doing. My ego, which at this point was running around like a three-year old child, was delighted to have such a powerful friend and ally and a huge smile crept over its face.

He also favored me with just a glimpse of his world. It was vast, intricate, multicolored and peopled with many plants and animals. He stood over it, encompassing and sheltering its inhabitants.

My second meeting with Don Machinga was not at all what I was expecting. Firstly, he was angry. He did not like the wooden floor of the building I was in. He told me to get off my mattress and feel the floor.

In so doing, I could sense the floor as cold, inert and lacking living spirit. Later, it transpired that the wood, which had been used to make this floor, came from an unspecified source, which was most likely the result of illegally clear-cutting the rainforest.