Mr. & Mrs. International Manifestations

The past month has been a whirlwind of activity, so much in fact that we´ve neglected this awesome site.  This, we hope, will not happen again.  So here´s a summary…

After finding out that our ´shaman´ was taking our money and getting really drunk with it, despite complaining to us again and again about the numerous health problems of his descendents, we decided to look elsewhere for instruction in the OtherWorld.  We met Antonio Vasquez via some really awesome French people (there are some), and traveled the 6 hours upriver to his home.  We stayed there 5 nights and drank Ayahuasca 4 times.  And it was totally different.  Our space was inside a giant mosquito net and it wasn´t just Antonio helping us–it was his entire family.  There were 5 people singing differeng songs, working different magicks on us and it was great.  Difficult, but great.  I saw my life in a different light, one that makes much more sense and has, thus far, allowed me to change some really deep programming.

After the Ayahuasca, we returned to Pucallpa for a few days, for the fiesta de San Juan, a huge jungle festival where everyone eats…Juane, flavored rice cooked in a banana leaf.  I banged on the drum and Peruvians watched, the women with a twinkle in their eye and the men with admiration.  Something was different.

A few days later, Mrs. International and I went our separate ways.  She to the coast, and me to Iquitos, the center for Ayahuasca shamanism in Peru, and maybe all of South America.  When I arrived, I was too tired, too run down to wade through the masses of ´shamans´ to find a shaman, so instead of drinking the medicine, I went and looked at the Amazon (it´s big) and looked at the women of the jungle (they´re hot.)  After a few days, and a growing desire to be with my wife again, I left on a lancha to Yurimaguas, three days downriver.  For 3 days, I swung in a hammock and watched the jungle pass me by (it´s big and hot.)  When I got to Yurimaguas, my plans were altered because of the proletariat´s belief that they could change something with action instead of money.  The entire region was shut down to protest the government´s selling off of the Amazon rainforest to private investors and speculators.  Silly proletariat.

When I finally started moving again, I moved fast and fluid and managed to cross the border into Ecuador and meet my Love again, two weeks to the hour after we left each other, exactly as we had said.  And that´s where we are, in a plush hostel with jacuzzis, saunas, steam rooms, and DVD lounge, regaining our energy and wondering why Ecuador uses the dollar.

More exciting stuff coming soon…

I’m in a hotel room.  It’s my first time to sleep at this hotel, but it’s not the first time that I’ve been here.  Mrs. International and I came here on our very first day in Pucallpa, but the rooms didn’t live up to my high standards so we moved into the love motel, Las Dunas, clean and plenty of mirrors.  All we had to do was put up with the occasional drama on Friday and Saturday nights.  I had money and by God, I would use it to sleep in clean comfort.  Sleep and dreams are the last to receive streamlining in my world because they are my most fundamental sources of comfort.   

Los Delfines sits relatively high in the rankings of cleanliness.  They have towels, little bars of soap and a shower.  Perfect.  It’s not dirty.  It just looks old and worn.  Lived in.  The first thing I appreciated upon arrival was the vista.  Selva.  A little patch of selva in the city of Yarinacocha. 

Ayahuasca, the medicine, is powerful stuff.  Hardcore psychedelic healing sessions.  But it’s not only a medicine; it can be a poision as well.  The nearby pueblo of San Francisco is notorious for it’s dangerous shamans.  This is not a game, the Catalonian assures me.  The world of the shamans is very very real.  It’s not like it is in the Castaneda books, but sometimes, it almost is.

Shamanism is a broad term covering many practices throughout many cultures.  The word shaman is originally a Mongolian word or perhaps it was a Siberian word or perhaps it was neither.  It’s come to mean all sorts of indigenous healers all over the world.  In the Americas shamans stretch from the very top tip to the very bottom tip.  There are various methods of practicing shamanism.  In the north of Americas dance, drum, and sweat are more common ways of entering the shamanic world, but here in the jungle, with the sun focused on this area of the world, strange plants grow, and the right combination of these allows access to the same (different) world.

The shamanic world, the Other side, is a world vastly different than this one, but just as real.  Valid.  The main difference is that the shamanic world is not physical.  It’s like heaven, a non-material place, only one need not die to participate in the shamanic world.  It’s readily available to anyone with the right practice and patience. 

Shamans go there for many reasons.  First and foremost, shamans are healers.  They enter the other world to see the other self, one of which all of us have.  The shamans want to see the other self because many illnesses manifest in the other world before they manifest in this world.  A physical problem often begins as a problem of the soul. 

Here, knee-deep in Shipibo cosmology, with worlds merging and my head rearranging itself, the shamans pull out the negative energies accumulated or attacking the soul.  From my limited experience, it seems that most illnesses are caused by an unhygenic energetic lifestyle and curing them is really a matter of cleaning the soul.  Sometimes the soul may have a whole in it, a wound caused by constantly picking a scab.  Or caused by another psychonaut of the other side, a brujo. 

Shamans.  Jedi.  Brujos.  Sith.  It’s easier to cause harm than to heal.  To hurt someone is easy, as simple as opening the mouth and allowing some of the filth and rot that have accumulated over the years spill out and further infect another.  Juan, the shaman of Santa Clara ’s wife died from a shamanic attack.  A brujo was envious of JUan´s power, which was vast and protective so attacked his wife.  Juan, desperate, tried to cure his wife, tried to heal the astral wound, but found only when it was too late.  Learning to cure someone is a far longer camino, one that fills a lifetime.

As more tourists, more money come to the jungle for energetic healings, a blackness spreads over the land.  The feeding frenzy for dinero.  It seems that noone is immune to the money sickness, that insatiable want.  This, that, or the other, but always something else.  Brujos flourish and the shamans accumulate a little of that dark cloud.  Black and white begin to gray. 

I had high hopes for my time in Santa Clara for my entrance into the world of shamanism.  I wanted to believe that everything was great, so I did.  I began my shamanic practice, blind to that world, like swimming in a murky lake on a moonless night, overly aware of the world around, but unable to see anything.  Scared of the dark. 

As things progressed in Santa Clara, it became obvious that Juan of New Chicago wasn’t the don Juan of the Castaneda books.  The don Juan here in Peru likes his aguadientes: stumbling drunk.  Once again, things have turned out to be different than first impressions.  That initial feeling was a fraud, a carefully manipulated trap.  Almost a month later, we’ll leave New Chicago and the shaman Juan for a different place, a project in the jungle, where prices aren’t fixed, where we decide what price is right.  The disease of money and the lust for money follows us wherever we go.  “We’re not ATMs,” I’ve said before to people, desperate to help them understand my situation, just as I’m trying to understand theirs.  We’re moving in an effort to stray away from the power of the Money-God.            

 I looked at the dead fish and froze.  I wasn’t sure if it really was a dead fish, but it was obvious that there was something solid sitting in that metal bowl, whatever it was.  I looked away and when I looked back it was still there.  It couldn’t have been a delusion or a hallucination.  I looked away again and confirmed its presence atop the rest of the sludge that I had vomited up.  It was real, but I knew that it was impossible.  There was no way that something the size of a piece of bread could’ve come out of my guts without me knowing about it consciously. 

Reality can be many things.  I had been hoping to see visions, to know more about other dimensions, but my teacher, Ayahuasca, didn’t think I was prepared for that just yet.  I was still too tainted, too dirty.  So she put me through a cleansing process.  I looked at the dead fish one last time before I lay back down on my blanket and laughed.  It was real.  It was all real, maybe not everywhere, but in the Peruvian jungle, shamanism, magick, the astral plane were all real.  In the States this couldn’t happen, or at least not as easily or as often as I figured it happened in Peru.  A Christian miracle sure, but not the manifestation of my negativity, my doubts, my darkness as a dead fish in a pool of my own vomit and disgust. 

In a second, I knew what the fish was.  I was a Pisces and Pisces are fish, two fish.  One capable of grand success and the other grand failures.  Somehow, I knew that fish in the bowl were my grand failures.  I would float to the top.  I laughed for another moment, and wondered if the shaman singing all the rot out of me thought I was crazy.  Probably not.  His Icaros, songs of power, were helping the plant medicine to pull things out of my body.  For an empty stomach, plenty was coming out. 

The healing session had started very blandly, so blandly that I was nearly ready to give it up and find another shaman.  Obviously this one didn’t know what he was doing.  I wanted visions and visions I would have.  I was restless, kept changing positions.  I alternated between wanting to kill the shaman to shut him up and to sing along with him.  The words were Shipibo, but from somewhere, I knew that if I sang, really sang, that I would know what to sing and when to sing it.  Gradually, my frustration grew.  I wasn’t seeing anything and that’s what I had paid for.  In another moment, my frustration gave way to anxiety and that soon revealed feelings of self-hate that I thought I had dealt with long ago.  Apparently, I had just covered them up. 

Before long, I was crying and then spitting.  Soon things started coming up on their own and I simply opened my mouth over my precious bowl and let them fall.  It wasn’t like vomiting from drink or drugs.  Sometimes it was violent, but most times, I simply realized that there was something in my mouth and I had no idea how it got there.  Sometimes, I could feel it slid up from my stomach, smooth and easy. 

No visions, but plenty of thoughts, plenty of realizations—how I could never possess my love; that one day I would die alone because there is no other way to die; that I would never really be alone, even when I died because everything is the same thing anyway.  I clung to my blanket on the floor, thankful to have something.  I had to ask Jose for the blanket and he quietly said he forgot, but as I threw up again and again, I realized that he didn’t forget the blanket.  He knew what was going to happen and thought it better to save his blanket.  
 

I looked up at the shaman, but could only hear him.  I could tell that he was swaying, deep in trance.  We were the only ones to have taken the medicine; everyone else in the room where either there to spectate or to offer their support.  Disillusioned, I laughed.  Juan, the shaman, was a tiny man who weighed no more than a 110 lbs.  He was old, maybe 80 or more, wizened.  His eyes had a constant sheen from so much Ayahuasca.  To cure with the medicine, you must partake in the medicine.  I understood the power of his songs, how they followed my delirium, soothing my pain when it was too much and stoking the fire when it was too low.  The entire point of the ceremony was to cure me.  I knew that I was sick, but I wasn’t sure what I had.  Apparently, I had had a dead fish stuck somewhere inside me for a long, long time. 

 I knew that I was sick and as I lay there as if breathing for the first time, I realized that I had contracted my illness not long after birth.  I was being cured of the illness of the West, the illness of money, greed, and insustainability.  For so long, I had known that something was wrong with me, that some fundamental switch was flipped in the wrong direction.  I lifted my head and confirmed again the presence of that dead fish, now only barely visible under the last layer of gunk that I had managed to bring forth from my body.  

I laughed again, lay back down on my blanket.  Juan blew his spirit at me through his breath and I mimicked him, laughing silently, so happy to be so miserable.  He stopped for a moment, and the sounds of the jungle outside filled the room.  So much life that it seemed it would be impossible ever to sleep.  Then Juan started again with his Icaros and my delirium increased as more of my sickness prepared to exit my body, from one end or the other.     

We arrived and our trip feels like it began again.  New Chicago, a barrio of Santa Clara, a small village on Lake Yarinacocha, was our current home.  We came to the jungle in search of Shamanism and healing.  And we found it…and at first it wasn´t good.  Read more…

Nous y sommes. Nous explorons de tout coeur. Nous avons rencontre Guillermo et le trio s’est immediatement forme. Suivant ses suggestions, nous avons marche deus journees pas entieres mais presque entre un soleil sans pitie et les grandes ombres des habitants de cette terre, le long de la laguna Yarinacocha. Chaque arbre a quelque chose de nouveau a offrir, des fruits de toutes sortes et de l’ombre, ahh, de l’ombre.

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Our time in Satipo was well spent, if a little lazy.  It was hard to do much, with a swimming pool just outside our door and the oppressive heat of the high jungle.  Somehow we managed to see a waterfall, learn about oranges, and make a few friends.  Ramiro and Lucho were our friends.  Ramiro ran the hotel, though he neither rented nor owned the place, and earned a tiny sum for all his hours of work.  The night before leaving, we celebrated his 41st by drinking coca-cola mixed with Peruvian beer.  Lucho was his son, 13 years old and full of curiosity about the world.  They were natives, which meant their bloodline was free or almost free of Spanish influence.  They were darker, more solidly built than the mestizos. 

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Le Perou se divise en trois zones distinctes, la cote, la sierra et la selva. Nous avons parcouru la montagne(sierra) en bus. De Lima a Cusco a Atalaya a Acayucho a Huancayo a Satipo. La selva se divise en alta selva, ou nous sommes maintenant et selva baja vers laquelle nous nous dirigeons doucement. Le matin les alentours sont dissimules sous quelques nuages puis la chaleur prends place pour la journee.

Go with the flow.

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Here, in Peru, riding the bus is a whole other world alltogether. 

Mrs. International and I began drifting away from shore when we said good-bye to Marcel.  It was only coincidence, to say it was Divine Intervention, that he was there at the point of our embarkation.  We left Cusco and our relative comfort.  Three weeks worth of roots was hard to just cut away.

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Change…

It’s hard to come by here in Peru. Everywhere we’ve been, in the places we thought change would be the most accessible…nada. No change. Zero. Zilch. At first it was funny; it was novel, but then it became irritating, and then finally a constant reminder that we’re not in Kansas anymore. True, we’ve only been to Kansas for a night, staying for free at the hospitable Cottonwood Ranch. We hadn’t been in Kansas for a very, very long time.

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Not much had changed. Nevertheless, I felt that the end had come.

Marcel left that morning, and despite our celebrations, Mrs. International and I have felt his absence. We were only together a week and a day, but time slowed down, packed itself full of meaning and substance. Sometimes, it was too much to assimilate, overloading.

Last night, we made a ceremony together, in the Crowe tradition, a tribe of Native Americans in Montana. We took a taxi to Templo de la Luna, a minor ruina de los Incas, close to impressive Saqsaywaman. I bargained with the driver, knowing that the price we agreed upon was too much. I had been certain that this man would give me a fair price, forgetting that a fair price was as much as I would pay. The sun set over the mountains, but was still far from the horizon on the plains. Read more…