Three years ago I visited Shaman Winston in the Peruvian Amazon for an eye-opening ayahuasca experience; at that time, many happy discoveries within myself had me anticipating an inevitable, future return. This time around there were fewer surprises and a little more adversity, yet again I feel better afterwards for having done it. The trip entailed two nights in the jungle removed from electricity, wifi yet accommodating in ample supply of mud and biting flies. It took a plane from Lima, a car, a boat and a short hike crossing a river twice to reach the Shaman’s compound. I was barefoot and shirtless the entire time (the native flies were well fed) — the two weeks subsequent itching a fond reminder of my time spend mostly naked and unafraid.
The low point of the weekend adventure was the afternoon of arrival — enduring a preliminary “cleansing ceremony” which wasn’t a part of my initial experience two years prior. The intent of the ceremony was to remove toxins and emotional restraints that would otherwise prohibit ayahuasca’s intended lessons. People who eat unhealthy diets, drink excessively need to be purged beforehand so that the plant can work its magic, so it was said. I should say that I already consider myself relatively cleansed — I don’t drink very often or much, avoid processed foods and sugar, don’t have any dark, suppressed, murderous urges. Nevertheless, I wasn’t going to be that guy who requests to forgo shamanistic ritual owing to self-assigned exemption. What the cleansing ceremony actually was, however, was a group forced-vomiting session.
One of the privileges of being me is that I have a very strong stomach. I regularly eat canned sardines, raw eggs and carrots for breakfast. I can count on one hand the times that I have vomited inclusive of over-consumption of alcohol and ipecac; thus, self-induced vomiting seemed a difficult endeavor and counter-intuitive to the intended catharsis. In other circumstances I would opt out, yet doing so would have played into the notion that I must have dark, suppressed, murderous urges that I wanted to keep hidden, right? — instead of ‘opening myself up’ to the experience for the sake of discovery and improvement. Of course I’m a team player so I went along with it.
The cleansing ceremony involved four of us in a 10-meter open-air hut seated in a semi-circle. The shaman provided us each with a a two liter plastic jug of warm water and about two ounces of tobacco juice. We were to drink the tobacco juice and then chug the warm water — as much and as quickly as possible — until we puked it all out for the sake of releasing the toxins and bad stuff that we had inside us from eating poorly, smoking cigarettes, doing drugs all those things that it was assumed we must be doing (that I wasn’t doing). I was willing to overlook the prescription of imbibing a known carcinogen for the sake of releasing toxins. I’m open-minded.
We all drank the tobacco juice. The flavor was as bad as you are probably imagining it is. But what was worse was having it inside my stomach without the slightest urge to expel it out. Like a dank, rotten shot of sewage wallowing inside me. So I started drinking the warm water. Pretty quickly a Peruvian man across from me (the sort that looks like he could do with a good cleansing) started retching into his puke bucket. A terrible sound. There are various degrees of vomit noise. This man was melodramatic. Imagine a Hollywood casting call for a scene involving a grotesque, outlandish vomit scene. This is the guy you want to cast — everything from his visage (overweight, unattractive, sweaty) to his enunciation and follow-through (attempt to ejaculate an imaginary, hypothetical golf ball lodged 4 inches down your esophagus using only forced air from your belly for a mock – re-enactment) — he was highly skilled, prodigious. His water jar was emptied and his vomit bucket filled before the rest of us had gotten started.
Long story short the others fell into line and did their vomit duties, while I could not. I drank more than a gallon of warm water (I am not exaggerating). The Shaman’s side kick had to go fetch more. Then he retrieved a long plant leaves to use as trigger-pulling gag-devices. I wore the first one out forcing down my throat and another was fetched for use. Eventually the Shaman relinquished and told me to stop drinking more water. He complemented me that I have a strong body, while also insinuating that I must have a tendency to suppress myself. As bad as it felt to have tobacco juice inside of my stomach – it felt worse to have a gallon of water in there along with it and a shaman hinting that I wasn’t being open to the experience. In the end I managed to throw up what I estimate to be 12 ounces of the water — a little cloudy from some of the tobacco. It did not feel cleansing and the warm, watery cloud of tobacco water bloated me for the next 36 hours.
The ayahuasca ceremony was later that night and as luck would have it I had the fortune of having my sitting mat adjacent to the aforementioned Peruvian Puker. After we all imbibed our ayahuasca — he puked more. He was obnoxiously loud, distracting and disgusting — the effects of the ayahuasca magnified his talents into symphonic four dimensional sound. It felt like a waterfall of cascading vomit was washing over me. The ayahuasca also magnified my emotions and distraction, frustration and turned it into rage. The first half of the roughly five hours were spend thus — supine, in a forced-zen trance of emotional suppression, heavy, slowed breathing and intense focus elsewhere with fingers in my ears. After the Peruvian Puker simmered down, kept quiet and passed out I took a second shot of ayahuasca at an attempt to catch up for lost time. It mostly was better after that — I was able to proceed.
Every person I know who has taken ayahuasca has related a different experience — yet common themes emerge; from what I determine, multiple levels of consciousness is common. What does the term “multiple levels of consciousness” entail? I’ll do my best to explain it in the context of my experience and others who seem to also have shared something similar. Generally when we think about being conscious we think of a static awareness defining who we are. We are awake. We are conscious. We are able to see things and think about what we see. We can also imagine the future and remember the past. We can visualize things creatively. It’s as if we have a camera on our forehead that records and plays back that we see. We can edit the footage when it’s convenient, even add in special effects for missing pieces. This is what I would term my definition of consciousness.
What ayahuasca has shown me, and also others I have talked to, is that our consciousness is comprised by a myriad of perspectives. Think of having 5 cameras instead of one. Now think that usually we are only paying attention to what one of those cameras is seeing. The rest of those cameras are still operating but the film they are recording goes straight to the storage vault — nobody ever watches the tape. Ayahuasca shows you the highlights and lowlights from all of that other tape you’ve collected but never watched. It goes over it with you in detail like a slow-motion NFL replay official. Along with you is the play-by-play commentator (you) who is explaining (to “you”) what was going on while during the play. You are usually on the film being watched, or someone you know, or a circumstance or situation that deserves to be pulled out of the vault for closer examination. You can watch such things from all sorts of different angles and even hear director commentary from different people (who are also you — perhaps a suitable analogy being that they represent your id, ego, super ego, separately). These replay angles are taken from those other five cameras I was describing earlier.
You might hear people who are into drugs talk about seeing things from different perspectives. I believe this a poor, trite explanation — it imparts little in the way of explanation to others who are likely to intuit some sort of drug-haze visualizations. As an alternative explanation I would challenge the skeptical to imagine instead of using the singular ocular consciousness I described earlier, to imagine a consciousness with multiple lenses that allows for watching their self from multiple vantages and also third party perspectives. From different cameras. Some of these cameras are held by other people, others are those built into you already. Some pick up sight, others emotions, feelings, nuanced perceptions, smell, flavor. Others are planted within the minds of people you know and by switching to a camera such as this you are able to actually feel emotions of the camera person when replaying film of yourself. A friend of mine related a perspective that was sort of like a camera that could zoom all over the world and able to zoom out to perceive an empathetic connection between humanity. And maybe that’s the same off-putting druggie explanation you’ve been rolling your eyes at in the past; I do believe that even if you feel this way, a similar experience would be profoundly affecting were you to experience it yourself.
On the hike out of the jungle two days later, I walked barefoot on the trail that was a foot deep with mud. My shirt had sponged my sweat and was entirely soaked in the wet, buggy air. I turned a corner and found many neon-colored frogs jumping all around. The brightest yellow that I have seen in nature – another striped with green colors. Hidden in the rainforest, emerging from dark, dank, muddy holes resplendent, vivid and stunningly bright. I am convinced they existed as analogy to that rugged trail that we slog — finding glimmers of fleeting beauty along the way when we are aware.
