Sapphire Song or Ayahuasca in the Amazon (part 3)

The lights are off, I’m laying on my mat nauseated in the dark. I’ve drunk a full cup of the mother vine. The maestros have decided that the previous two nights Ayahuasca has been too weak. The previous group to ours had a very special batch of Ayahuasca found very deep in the jungle. It is made with what the maestros are calling the mother vine of Ayahuasca. Generally Ayahuasca is harvested at five years of age and my be 10 or 12 inches around. This vine was as big around as a tree and was approximately 25 years old. It was so alive and full of spirits, John said he was able to cut through it with his machete, no axe needed. Camp has been buzzing about it since its arrival this morning. It is a dark brown compared with the earlier Ayahuasca’s almost glowing orange color. After feeling the strength of the previous night’s full cup I have no idea what to expect from this new, even more potent brew.
I decide the nausea is too much when I lay down. I sit up in hope it might relieve it some. It doesn’t work. I get up to use the restroom knowing the hit is on its way. I walk back to the black corridor behind the shower curtain that separates the bathrooms from the ceremony room, my little head lamp lighting the way. I go into one of the stalls and as I start to go I think of the mantra I’d been listening to earlier in the day from a Tool song, “your body is light you are immortal, your body is love you are eternal.” I repeat this over and over again as the spot light from my lamp begins to pulsate with green intricate patterns on the wall. Hello, again. I leave the bathrooms and return to the ceremony room, but I can’t return to my spot. I pace in the darkness behind the group repeating the mantra to myself. The icaros stop for a moment. The floor is yours the spirits tell me. “ May I say something maestro?” I ask Hamilton. “Of course” he answers, so I repeat the mantra to the group. Hamilton says it is true and beautiful.
I kneel down at the front of my mat, silently mouthing the words of my mantra, holding on to it for strength. Visions come, knocking down the black walls with the bright colors of the medicine. The room is alive and bright as day with a kaleidoscope of color. I look around at the indiscernible shapes of the spirits all around me. We are here, they tell me, what are you going to do? We can tear you apart if you want or you can dominate us. I’m frightened as their eyes melt in and out of each other, watching me. They swirl and dance, unknowing or not caring that their motion is multiplying my nausea. I try to sit up straight and I say the word, dominate. It resonates with its own power. I understand now what Mimi was talking about when she described how it is necessary to dominate the spirits as well as yourself when you are in an Ayahuasca ceremony. It’s not a cruel dominance, like a master dominating a slave, but the cool and controlled dominance of an experienced ranch hand breaking a wild horse. You have to dominate your terror, and I found it the best way to pay respect to the Maestros, think of how much more they have been through. Suck it up and take it. You literally asked for it.
I roll onto my back, the weight of the diets restricted and sparse menu clawing through me. But it’s not just the diet it’s the stress and worries of my life as well. I’m tired inside my bones, inside my soul “I’m tired, I’m fucking tired.” I yell out to who’ll ever listen. “Eat some chicken!” a fellow dieter responds to my cry. The purge comes and I find I’m sitting up. La purga, the purge, the native people call Ayahuasca. Western people with all their crossed and confused energies come to Ayahuasca with so much work to do on themselves. The natives, with their relatively straight energies come and say “It cleansed my stomach.” The medicine is purging my stomach making room for tonight’s lessons. I become aware that something is portraying it’s self thorugh me. My stance becomes it’s stance over my puke bucket. My arms are straight, shoulders high, knuckles curled on the ground. Long white hair grows from them as if the white masts of a ship are growing from my forearms. The arms of a gorilla. He pounds his fists on the ground and roars at the bucket in dominance of the spirits it holds.
My hair hangs in my eyes as I look down into the darkness of the receptacle. I snort and huff snot and vomit from my nose and lips. I shake my mane of hair and realize I don’t have a mane, whatever I’m sharing my body with does. Nor do I have the long black horns I can see in my peripheral vision. The head of a bull. I still have my body but it seems to glow with a guardian shape that is encompassing me. It is my guardian and he has come to protect me in ceremony. He shares his power with me but it is still his. He takes off my sweaty shirt, “let me breath!” he roars to me. “Recognize your strength, your masculinity.” He tells me. “You’ve been repressing and ignoring it. Stop.” He growls through me. I look up through my hair, chin held high and take in my new world with my new eyes. My lip curls in a snarl. Challenge us, we dare you, we project to the world. My hair in my face and the snarl on my lips I can’t help but think of Glen Danzig, in full form at the helm of the Misfits. My guardian seemed to dredge up some kind of Neanderthal hand gestures to me. Knuckles pounded together meant respect. A fist pounded against the heart meant courage. And two fists pounded on the chest meant dominate. I would use these throughout my journeys to communicate my feelings.
I stand up, and begin to look around the room, making a circular motion in place. My gaze crosses the maestros. I see Hamilton, his dark shape vibrating and emitting beautiful black tendrils of smoke. “What’s up.” I say in my mind, a greeting to another and far more experienced traveler of this world. “What’s up.” he answers telepathically to my mind, happy to see me up here. I just had a telepathic conversation I think to myself, but it seems completely natural in this state. It’s just the way it is. My vision is vibrating because my third eye’s lids are shaking under the weight of their first real usage. I can literally feel it in the middle of my forehead. Like a baby’s legs struggling to support him during his first steps, or atrophied muscles awakening to regain their instinctual but forgotten paths. I turned to the back of the room and I saw the darkness.
The front of the ceremony house, where the shaman are seated, seems to glow with the medicine and non-judgmental love. They are beacons of light in a sea of chaos. The back of the room is black now. I grow curious and bold with the new found strength from my guardian. “Are you really back here?”, I ask myself. Is there really the evil I’ve heard Hamilton speak of in the dark places of the world? And as I creep farther and farther away from the protective spiritual fire of the shaman, I hear a cold Hiss escape from the darkness. It is ancient and huge and says through the hiss “don’t come back here boy unless you really want to know what’s back here. I’m not fucking with you, so unless you want me to, get out!” I feel isolated in the darkness, the hiss the most frightening thing I’ve ever heard. Like the monster from your childhood fears at your bedroom doorway, silhouetted by a flash of lighting. Only it’s not your imagination, it’s really there. But this is no childhood monster, this is evil, old and criminal. In Ayahuasca I learned you have to pick your battles. You have a certain amount of spiritual energy to do battle with and it’s up to you to apply it where it’s needed and not waste it wear it’s not. This wasn’t my battle, this evil wasn’t me, it was outside of me and it wasn’t my work to do. My guardian had let me wander a bit into the darkness, because there was a lesson to be learned, and I feel the only reason I got the warning of the hiss was because his watchful eye was over me. Evil doesn’t like a fair fight, and he would have been a handful. But this evil certainly didn’t want a little brat wondering around on his territory either, so he told me to get out. And I did.
I went back to the light of the shaman’s fire. Flexing my muscles at the darkness while staying inside of the shaman’s protection. A little Indian brave dancing safely at the fires edge.
I knelt down at the end of my mat, to feel the pulse of energy in my body and listen to the Icaros. As I did this, the invisible hands from my first ceremony returned along with the puppeteer. The rods at my wrists and elbows curled my hands up into my armpits, making the form of chicken wings. And they began to pump against my body. Why the hell am I acting like a chicken I wondered? “I am a chicken!” I said out loud. “I’m a chicken.” And I realized I was. I’d been so predisposed with courage and conquering fear and not being afraid, that I’d been suppressing the fact that I was. I was terrified and that was okay, I was doing a scary thing and that was what fear is for. An ex of mine had a personality trait book that we used to look thorugh and I always seemed to match the number 6 personality type, a loyalist. I had always hated that. I didn’t like the descriptions of a loyalist, or the famous people and characters associated with them. One of which was the cowardly lion, from the wizard of Oz. I hated being grouped in with him, I was no coward! I was always brave! But that wasn’t true. I often acted tough on the outside while having fear creeping around inside. But I would never admit that to anyone. But by the act of admitting it to my self and the world the opposite became the real truth for the first time. I had to admit to being a coward in order not to be one. A dry heave tore through me and I could feel the dense energy of fear leaving my body. What a gift to transcend that.
I was very pleased with the work done. I sat down, and found that my body naturally wanted to go into yoga poses. I only know basic ones and my body felt like elastic like I could stretch and flex into any position I wanted. I must say a huge cat like stretch on Ayahuasca is a feeling second only to a very few others. After some stretching I found my self in a kneeling Buddha pose. And I felt like a statue, an eternal living statue. I knew why the great stone Buddhas litter the ancient ruins of the Far East. I felt what the great monks and transient messiahs felt. Why the people of antiquity would make shrines to this perfect and whole expression of existence. And I stayed there with my life force and the universes as one, until the lamps where lit again.