Ayahuasca Mind Part 5

Are The Dead Alive?

 

 

Ceremony: The Hook Inside My Inside Eye

 

Each ayahuasca brew, like the existentialists say of all people, is sui generis, an absolutely unique category unto itself. Its character is dependent upon the proportional harmony that arises from the quantity of leaves/plants used, the quality of leaves/plants (dependent upon local climate, time of day picked etc.), the thoroughness of the refinement process, and the intention of the maker --- an important and overlooked factor.
 
The day before, Don E.’s wife travels to the local market for some goods. While there she is mugged, beaten up and left with fewer possessions than she came with. A distraught Don E., concerned about his wife, finds it difficult to concentrate on the minutae of ayahuasca brewing and the medicine is noticeably weaker. Other than the fleeting visualization of a light-river flowing upstream through my nose, hooking itself into my third eye, and flowing downstream through my titled mouth, only contemplation and somatic sickness fill the ceremony.

 

Ceremony: The Centuries Old Unmet Composer

 

Gulp.
 

I tame the urge to vomit.
 

Don E. chimes in with susurrus sounds that call on the mareado to rise. It drifts in and out as he continues to play his song. This being the last ceremony, he gives each patient an “arkana”, a sort of protective song-ritual, to help keep in all we’ve learned over the course of these two weeks. Don E. sways back and forth in front of me, softly whistling the prelude to a powerful icaro that lasts more than five minutes. The mareado deepens…
 

“Holy shit!”
 

I get sucked into the geometric webs emanating from his multi-tonal & incomprehensible icaro as it cocoons my body in patterns of diaphonous architecture. His powerful masculine voice grows for an eternity before subsiding into a feminine tranquility that wraps the vocal shield up.
 

Pshooo…
 

He blows agua florida onto the crown of my head and pushes the arkana in by compressing the sides of my skull and chest.
 

Visions wax and wane throughout the whole ceremony according to the time-signature dictates of an unmet composer. During a more contemplative measure I began thinking about the sum total of dead people from all of history. Where are they? Did they all simply disintegrate into the environment? Are they floating around in some capacity, influencing the present situation in ways unknown to most? Why is the appeasement of ancestor spirits so vital to many cultures? 

As this vista of questioning unfolds, a new contemplative landscape opens. What will the blow-back of bad karma, the collective impressions of Evil, be? It’s known in physics that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, what will the “equal and opposite” reaction to centuries of murdering-raping-pillaging be? The instances of these actions have been expanding in the collective psyche for centuries and centuries, what will the force of the contraction spell out for humanity and Spaceship Earth? It ain’t goin’ to be pretty folks (to put it lightly).
 

Don E., like the steady drum beat backing a free jazz solo, provides the rhythmic ground of continuous song to orient the direction of my thinking.
 

And then silence...
 

“Would anyone like a second cup of ayahuasca?”

I contemplate this for a moment, but the moment ends soon when I come to notice  the watery-webs expanding in every direction from my spacious eyeballs. I’m underwater and cannot take such an innocent sounding question seriously, so I laugh. No one drinks a second cup tonite. The ceremony ends and we all huge Don E.

Off in my bed I lie perfectly content with my last night in paradise.