This document is a recapitualtion of events that took place in the jungles above Rio de Janeiro in April, 2006. If you wish to follow the text chronoligically scroll down and begin with the first posting at the bottom. All work here is copyrighted and may not be copied, stored, or reproduced in any form without the author´s permission. REB 05/06
Star Works 4
The Daimistas revoke the doctrine that damned are consigned to an eternal vacation in hell, and in a move that would make a Buddhist proud, they seek to actively liberate through conscious invocation souls and entities that have been trapped or lost in the darkness. It is an action of extraordinary insight and of astonishing compassion. After all, how far would you go in order to liberate another soul? Haven’t we been tau(indoctrinated)ght that it is Divine Law that a damned soul is castigated? And even if it were possible to redeem a condemned soul, what if anything could a mere mortal human do about it?
Well, if you were a Jihaddist you would probably blow some shit up, kill a bunch of people and generally makes things worse. If you were a Theravadan Buddhist you would concede that your primary responsibility was taking care of your own karmic junkyard and go about purifying yourself according to the Noble Truths and the Triple Gem. Once you had sufficiently put a hold on doing more damage to yourself, other beings, and the web of life you would carry on your existence in an exemplary way trying to show others how to do the same, according to their capacity to understand and implement the Path. And besides, you wouldn’t be worried too much about the ‘eternal hell’ thing because there really is no (anglo-male-single-and-certainly-not-jealous) God. On top of that there are no eternal souls to be caught in the first place.
But, if you were a Daimista you would hold a Star Works.
And there I was amidst a crowd of church parishoners who were either writhing and contorting, or assisting the writhing and contorting, or were singing their hearts out with hymns of pure worship. I with my embroidered stark white shirt and my shard of rutillated Brazilian quartz crystal and my ecumenical icons tattooed all over my body. Sitting there wide eyed with an authentic ‘holy shit’ look on my face as the Divine Army went to work ushering the moha afflicted spirits up and out and meanwhile a door had opened up in my head and I was staring clear as day into a mud hut filled with rows of dark brown people dressed in grasses and bone necklaces, some of whom had noticed me and were looking up half amazed, half delighted that I had somehow managed to show up in their ceremony which was taking place about a thousand years ago.
And there was Paulo overseeing the whole affair with the rapt attention of a mother hen. An unlikely figure with his bushy hair, pointy ears and an incredibly white pair of tennis shoes. The reverend on a mission tending his flock, busying about and lending a hand to a fallen here, laying on of hands to another there, and when the moment was just right he was there with a shot glass of Daime administering the medicine of redemption to the sick and the lost. He was a physician of lost souls opening a portal of Light and creating the possibility of ascension once again.
And here was a big dude standing in front of me, big as life and looking as if he were as hard as wood. And he’s telling me it is time to get up because it is time to do some ‘work’, to do some ‘cleaning‘. We were going to do some purifying. And I got up because it seemed like the thing to do and I didn’t want to offend any incarnate or disincarnates and he took me over to an open area behind the rows of chairs and he wanted to know my name and where I lived and because I had gotten up just a wee bit too fast and the DMT was just then getting a bit more busy in my head I was having a hard time commanding human language. Besides, I didn’t really have a home cause I didn’t really live any ‘where’ but I didn’t think that was going to be a satisfactory answer so I mumbled something that I hoped would get lost in all the hearts out singing and guitars and maracas and meanwhile Hardaswood was starting to de-materialize and turn into a mass of fuzzy little points of light and there was that halo of white incandescence around the edges of my visual field that was the harbinger of either passing out flat on my face or throwing up all over this nice and well-meaning entity that was only trying to get me purified. And all I could do at that moment was close my eyes and breath really deeply and really clearly and I could hear Hardaswood somewhere on the other side of the colleseum saying, ‘That’s good, let’s do some breathing to get purified’.
So I breathed and I shook and stretched myself out and felt better and less like projectile vomiting and I brushed off all the parts of my body that I could reach and I prayed and I breathed some more and somewhere through all of that Hardaswood had found someone else to purify and I edged away hoping that I was pure enough for the time being. Actually I did feel pure, purified and electrically clean. My whole body was a vibrational force field massing with streams and pulsations of energetic sensations. I was completely turned on and felt hyper lucid and I was looking at a world that was ultra clean and crisp and everything made perfect sense even though I couldn’t really describe what it was exactly that made sense. And all of this clean hyper energize vibrational meness was drawn over to one of the mediums who was wracked and twisted on the floor with his hands bent behind him in a spastic twisting. One of the fedadoes, one who wears the star as a sign of his or her commitment to the faith and the church, was with him making sure he didn’t bang his head or bite his tongue out and I was called by a presence to stand and bear witness to the scene. All three of me came a stood over the boy. The ego-me was watching detachedly and in a bubble of protective doubt. The kid was just one of those at-risk youths and he was hanging out in the church and pretending to be some kind of spirit medium going through this and that kind of antic hoping to get attention and maybe some praise from the powerful and charismatic leaders of the group. The ego-me was playing along but watching from behind the glass wall. The meso-me was a wash of streaming energy fields all flowing and coursing and wrapping the boy and fedado in a massive cocoon of whitish energy. Meso-me was a human framework of localized energy that could semi-autonomously direct thought/energy. Meso-me focused varying densities of energy through the exertion of an internal appendage called a will which was the crossover point between the directive intent of the Greater Field and the subjective intent of the organism aspect of the Field. Meso-me made discriminations about the information pulsing through the sensory channels of the organism but didn’t make judgments. There may only be a lonely boy trying to get attention here but standing and swathing him in Light couldn’t do any harm. And there may also be a transcendental multidimensional phase shift going on where a mind point energy being is being allowed access to an evolutionary leap. There may even be more than one. There may be hundreds who have come having heard about the Star Works, thousands seeking refuge and trying to find that one eye in the cosmic needle. The thought of a suicide occurred to meso-me and the images of such intense and crushing isolation, such overwhelming pain and suffering, such profound confusion that would drive a human to destroy itself was almost unbearable. But even worse was the image thought of that soul lost in the bardo realms not even knowing that it was dead. Trapped in an unending shadowland of horrible isolation and burning suffering, confusion and delusional darkness enfolding upon more and more shadows of darkness. How could there be a way out of that? What insanely improbable chance could that soul have of coming into a clearing and rebirthing in order to start the work again; the work of clearing and purifying, of enlightenment and liberation? Macro-me was about two feet above the top of my head. Impassive. Clear. Radiant. Macro-me saw between the worlds. Below were the material entities doing the work of rebirth and growth, of healing and transcendence, of doing all that is necessary in order to understand and master light energy technology, the mechanisms that are cosmically intrinsic to the ascension. And below them were the shadowlings. Disincarnates karmically separated from the Light and lost in the realms of illusion. Above was a column of Light and above the above the above was the Archangel Michael. Pure and luminous Light. Pure and unconditional loving Light. Michael was Peace and Michael was a refracted band of Light, a single powerful and slender coursing of the pureness and radiant Being of all Beings. Michael was a way by which the effulgence could be known. Michael was an ordering principle through which the entire process of recognition, refinement, redemption, and return could occur. Within the ordering field of the angelic presence all of us merged into one thing. The shadowlings, the boy, the fedado, all the mes, all the Daimistas in the church and the column-light entity evaporated into a whitish diffuse energetic pool. Colors and edges and forms of all the different parts still existed but they were all aspects of the one thing. A cool and clear energy filled it all. We were all the one presence. We were all returned to wholeness.
Whatever it was that needed to happen happened and the boy got up and walked away. The fedado went back to the neat rows of chairs with neat rows of white shirts and stars still singing their hearts out. I returned to my seat. Reborn.
On invisible cue the little doors at the back of the church opened again and without missing a beat parishioners lined up for another quaff of the Daime. Candles and Christmas lights glowed merrily and in a matter of fact nonchalance shot glass after shot glass tipped end up. Navy trousers and pressed shirts on one side and white blouses and navy skirts on the other. The first round of the brew served tends to be a bit weaker so that everyone can get warmed up, do a few spiritual deep knee bends and brace for the work ahead. The second (and third, and fourth) round tends to be the stiffer stuff, the kind of brew that puts the word theos into the word entheogen. The Divine Imperial Light was calling Its children to return, to order, and to work on the task at hand. I wasn’t about to miss out on that one. I edged up space by space and could still taste the first round of the powerful jagube tea somewhere in my system. The deep memory of it infused me with strength and hope and wonder. Wow. If you are going to have a sacrament then this was the way to go. If felt an immense sense of brotherhood with all the people around me and was immensely pleased to be their guest, to a comrade in the ranks of Those Who Give Praise.
Two people in front of me. One person with me behind watching him take the Holy Daime. The man in the room filled with soft warm light filled a shot glass with a bile colored liquid. The man in the room filled with alters and icons, the dry dusty air coming in out of the deep desert where John and the other Fathers ate wild honey and drank goat’s milk, where the Essenes prayed in deep solitude under a vast sky, where the Light of the Burning Bush shone, where the dove descended, where the thick deep waters of the deepest forest flowed, sometimes milky, sometimes tea black, sometimes crystal clear and spotted with pink dolphins, in the impossible tangle of flora, the Amazona where the medicine people lived and ate passion fruit and humming birds, where the Juramidam has been for ever singing a song line, waiting for His brother Oshala to come all the way over from Africa, waiting for His bija mantra, core of the Holy cosmic mandalas, the Christ to come and walk the Earth, waiting for all the children to come and to sing praise and light and blessings. I took a deep breath and tipped the shot glass, holy sacrament flowing down into my throat. The bitterness sank in leaving a residue like the saliva of something ancient. Something older than time. I swallowed with immense gratitude, handed the glass back and returned to my place in the extraordinary mandala that surged alive and vibrant within the octahedral Ba Gua of chairs arrayed around the star table with the intensely white cloth, the Cruz Caravaca standing sublime at the center.
As I sat, rutillated crystal shard and iconic tattoos, I wondered about my good fortune and about the long and winding path that I had taken to come to that church. Just the thought of the many different incarnations I had gone through in my present lifetime, let alone the possibility of hundreds, even thousands of others was breathtaking. Did we really go through incarnation after incarnation bound to a path determined by the conditioned patterns of karmic influence we generated with each thought and action? With each birth were we subsumed into a different and individuated consciousness and isolated by a fog of forgetting from all of the other lives? Do we learn through accretion in a heuristic and all the way carry an akashic record of all that we have known and experienced? Does that accretive holographic wave form that we call a soul steadily compound and evolve as it propagates through the continuum? Is the evolution intentional? Is the entire system of life generation and autopoetic evolution driven by an intelligent agent with specific intention? What is the function of my self-awareness in all of this? Is my sentience a crucial element in the workings of the entire system or is it a kind of cereal by-product and dispensable appendage? Am I going to loose the sublime self-aware lucidity of this life as I have apparently lost from all the others?
No real or tangible answers were forthcoming. Just a big eye staring from out of nowhere. It didn’t really matter because in a way I had come to accept that the answers to the life questions I posed came in various channels. Life, I have found, has a way of reflecting back to me what I need to know. It seems to be a kind of giant mirror. It (life) is a reflecting process the shines back what is put into it. And it seems to be a mechanism that is driven by intent. Sentient consciousness is the driving energy, intent focuses and directs the energy of thought and intention, and life and the universe just shine it all back but with amplification. Being in that church with all those amazing people, the sacred circle and the table with the amazingly white cloth on it, a pure chalice for the Caravaca…having the jagube flowing through everyone, inspiring life, the astounding work of compassion going on all around me…I had no way or measuring any of it and had a hard time imagining how I ever managed to make my way to that place (which was amazing except for that damned eye!). Come to think of it, where was I anyway? The second wave of Daime was impending. I could feel it swelling up somewhere in my spine and through the middle of my body, somewhere in the transparent inner image I have of myself the Christmas tree lights were beginning to light up all over the place. The ordinarily transparent and dark core of my body was beginning to gather another shimmering aura of tessellating and filigreed luminous patterns.
The eye. I would have loved to have just ignored the eye. -or better, if there had to be an eye, I would have loved for it to be one of God’s eyes shining down on me in glorious beneficence (maybe in a very indirect way it was…), or an angelic eye (if they have eyes…) or even the eye of some dear departed friend who was looking for a way to the jagube bar (maybe it was that too but I just couldn‘t recognize him)… But instead it was a reptilian eye. A big one at that. Golden yellow iris speckled with grainy textures and a black slit for a pupil. Light green and tan scales rimmed the eye. I had heard through various channels that the reptiles show up while one is tripping on hallucinogens. And why not? What’s the big deal anyway? So there’s this race of super intelligent lizards who have managed to somehow transport interdimensionally (that’s pretty easy, isn’t it?) and they have managed to plug into the human consciousness bandwidth and not only are they rigging our heads with implants that draw off our psychic energy and leave us drained psychicly stunted trolls, but they actually inhabit people’s bodies (David Ike thinks that Hillary Clinton is a reptile) and enslave humans by controlling social and political agendas…from the inside, so to speak… but you can only see them when you are on LSD. […come to think of it Terrance had a trippy story about lizards, and remember that scene in Fear and Loathing where Thompson (played by Depp) is in the hotel bar surrounded by dinosaur people? Gotta be just coincidence. Just gotta.]
And I thought about how hard it seems to be to try to elevate people’s consciousness, how hard it is to stay on track when working the Path. I thought of how difficult it is to live in a kind of spiritual darkness where prayer and meditation are met with only a dull kind of blankness. I thought of the stray thoughts that seem to come from nowhere and the cramped and incessant sexual urges that lead nowhere but seem to generate only more desire and lead farther and farther from compassionate goodwill. I thought of how much anger and resentment I have; anger that seems to have no root or reason, that has been my companion for my whole life. I thought of how many people there are in the world living in abject poverty and without hope of living a better life. How many people have committed suicide out of despair, deep and abiding loneliness, destroyed themselves because of a gnawing kind of insanity that robs the world and people and life of any kind of meaning or worthiness? And then there are the places in the world that are really dark; the ghettos and the endless slums and barrios, the prisons and detention centers, and concentration camps, Gitmo, Gaza, Al Jahzar. The names of places where the darkness has come to feed and where humanity has collapsed wholesale into madness, into outright spiritual hell…Treblinka, Cambodia, Rawanda…
And I was shown the veil of grief and sorrow, the shores of immense darkness and suffering, the reservoir without end that holds the seeming endless effluent that pours forth from this realm of material beings, so many creatures tangled in a net of blindness, desire, and fear. Moha: (Sanskrit) the spiritual bewilderment and confusion brought on by misperception and misunderstanding.
My mind became a pin prick on the side of that dark sea through which the hot and violent energy could escape. Through the grace of the Daime I became an opening, an escape valve so to speak. Slowly at first (perhaps so as to allow me to embrace my new role as a spiritual medium) and then with increasing intensity the flow surged. Images of so many suffering souls teeming in the lower bardos flashed through me. Lizard people or no, many hells or not, there was a lot of chaotic energy and nature needed a way to balance it all out. Macro-me watched with detached brilliant intensity as Nature created a fantastic synergistic relationship between a condensed energy chemical composite synthesized by plants and an advanced sentient species wherein pure energy which had been perturbed and distorted by imbalanced actions was allowed to flow osmotically in order to restore a favorable equilibrium to the overall system. Meso-me was on-board with the game, sweating it out, on fire with the torrent of energy, and privately thrilled with the sensation of being transformed into a human firehose. Ego-me was oddly silent.
Energy gushed. Grief and fear and terror and anguish and blind thrashing confusion all distilled down into a plasma of darkness…but all pure energy nonetheless. Moving energy from one dimension into a lighter and more radiant one. More energy gushed and pulsed in a powerful rhythmic flow. All in a powerful upward motion. Sweat, gasps for air, tears. More energy. The opening through which all of this could pass was only as big as my body’s ability to act as a conduit. There seemed to be no more of it flowing than what I could withstand energetically. Somewhere in the archives of my mind my middle self manifested a mantra to guide and direct the process in accordance with my individual capacity to comprehend what was going on. ‘Only by the Light shall you come here. Only by the Light shall you come here. Only by the Light shall you come here…” Over and over again. The mantra was a mechanism which allowed the more condensed and conceptual parts of my mind to forge a deeper alliance with the higher dimensional aspects of my being. It was a way of attuning the rational and linear part of me (geared to the orientation of the individual physical self) with my global directive me (that part of me that is a holographic Lightbody, that part of me that Paulo would say, “Sits in the throne of your being“.). It was a mechanism that muffled the chatter and static of the conceptual mind so that the clear energy could work of its own accord. It was an anchor that held fast my clear sense of self against the powerful tides of fear and delusion. It was a shield against the reptilian consciousness looking through the astral veils with great hunger and intent. But as much as it was a kind of necessary protection it was also permeable and it allowed me to see what was out there. This armor was not a prison but a tool and it provided me with essential stability. Only by the Light shall you come here. Only by the Light shall you come here. Lizards, lost souls, dragons and demons…Only by the Light shall you come here.
Like a river of devotion. Like the sacred syllables etched forever on the wheel of dharma turning and turning in the winds of cosmic change. Like prayer flags fluttering high in the thin air reaches of the Himalayas. On and on singing. Like banners of light moved by the breath of the greatest of angels. Like fields of flowers forever opening in an endless spring. On and on they sang. Like a powerful updraft rising out of the world of selfish concerns and piercing the opaque bubble of narcissistic self absorption they sang. When one hinario ended they reflected briefly and then started right into the next. On and on the octahedral prayer wheel of Light, shirts and ties on one side and skirts and blouses on the other, spun around the brilliant white table. It was an on-going chorus of voices lifted in devotional prayer. The force of the intent caused an enormous upwelling, like a hot air balloon; only instead of hot air it was filled with inspired consciousness. This great upwelling caused an opening into the higher dimension of Light. It was into this dimension that we released all that was rising up from the things of the realm of moha.
That which needed to happen took care of itself. That part of the release that needed to move through me,that took me as a mechanism necessary for the restoration of equilibrium, ran its course, ending almost as abruptly as it began. I sat in my chair and felt blown open with a wide wind passing through me. The Daimistas sang on and on. Tne Daime in me decided it was time to go inward. My inner vision light up with the triangle icon floating illuminated in the darkness of my though realm. It floated iridescent and filigreed, boiling with fractal geometrics. I breathed deeply bracing for the jump. My sense of being me began to slowly collapse. Sensory information that was ordinarily discreet and assembled in coherent balance began to reorganize and overlap; sound becoming light, touch becoming taste, smell becoming texture. I wasn’t in a church any more. The idea of a church dissolved away leaving abstract impressions of roofs and floors and people. The whole conceptual schemata of a church floated in and out of focus carrying meaning only in a relativistic sense. Any meaning at all was contingent on there being a me to make sense of it and my sense of me was gradually dissolving into a wash of technicolor geometrics and phantasmagoria. Who was there anymore? Ideas arose from nowhere and flowed back to nothing in a stream of unpossessed information. Nothing belonged to anything. And yet there was the arising. Waves of textures and colors and fantastically intricate information arose on the surface of some kind of sea to wash away, folding back into the darkness that began right on the other side of knowing. The universal mirror reflected itself but without any trace of distinction of self or other. The arising came upon itself as naturally as the seasons come and go. Nothing grasping, nothing withholding. Who was there anymore?
There is a place where the edge of all things falls away into an infinite void. It is only a place in terms of conceptual reference for it does not exist physically nor can it actually be located in any kind of three dimensional continuum. But it can be experienced, or at least one can experience approaching it. All one knows of it is a returning from it back into referential consciousness. A sense of having gone completely blank for an indeterminate time and then reappearing, either suddenly or gradually; like awakening from a deep dreamless sleep. What can that place be called? What, if anything, can be said of it? It is the void and yet one still has a vague and floating sense that something did happen. Something did take place and that there was a ’someplace’ from where the sleeper has returned from. When I consider it I am left wordless, a kind of mute incapable of meaningful utterance. The Sanskrit word turya describes this other state. It is the beyond state; outside of waking, meditating, sleeping, or dreaming. The yogic masters say that something exists out there. They are the strange mariners who have sailed dark waters and returned with tales of the hidden mysteries. They say that the purushu exists out there in an infinite void. It is the atman that has pulled free from the polarized bending of subjective experience. It is a state that seems unto itself for nothing reflects back from it into the self that can be recognized or handled in any way. All that remains of it is the vague sense of having fallen away and then returning.
White shirts, dark blue ties and dark blue pants. A Solomon’s star in gold pinned to the breast of the shirt for the men and an embroidered patch over the breast for the women. Sexes divided along a neat line down the middle and in the center of the church a large table in the shape of the twin intersecting triangles, pristinely covered with a neatly ironed white cloth. Candles blazing, the photos of the patriarchs and in the center a Daime cross; one upright and two cross bars, the lower larger than the upper. At each intersection and at the ends of the bars and at the top holding five-pointed stars, the entire array draped with garlands of semi-precious stones dripping with sparkles. The posts holding up the corrugated tin roof were adorned with bouquets of banana leaf and white flowers. The only wall was adorned with photos of the masters of the lineage, most of which were monochrome and visibly aged. Where there would have been other walls were just open spaces that looked out into the darkness of the night filled with the shrill calling of nocturnal insects.
Everyone looked very dapper, imbued with an air of earnest sincerity. It was the air of openness and friendship that quelled the gnawing unease in my gut. You just never know what is going to show up when you do psychedelics, even entheogenics in a chuch dedicated to the Christ. And my last round with the Dime had definitely put me on edge, merging with the divine spirits in the forest not withstanding. I was definitely uneasy with cults, or anybody for that matter, programming ‘teachings’ into my head. And then there was the matter of all those ‘others’ dwelling on the other side of the glass panel that I had to worry about.
On a cue that I was oblivious to Dime was served. On the back wall doors to small windows were opened and everyone qued up to partake in the sacrament. White shirts, navy ties and trousers on one side, white blouses and navy skirts on the other. It seemed to me that given the extraordinary nature of the sacrament and its critical role in the experiential nature of worship in the church that there should have been more ritual, fanfare, or hoopla. But as it was, the taking of the sacrament seemed a rather matter of fact affair. People got in line, got their shot glass, drank it, and then went to sit down again. I took a deep breath and got in line. "At some point you must cast yourself onto the waters of faith. You must let go completely into the flow of God’s being," Paulo’s words from our first meeting rolled through my head. This truly was an act of faith, wasn’t it? Psychedelics have the utmost power to strip a man bear, tear him to a million little pieces, and then scatter the bits from one end of the cosmos to the other, several cosmoses actually. The faith then was hoping that there was something out there that was kind and gentle enough to gather up all the tid bits, glue them all back together again, and hopefully come up with something that more than less resembled what took the psychedelic in the first place. Then I would be happily back in my me and it would be time for a snack and then bed….
The line edged forward, and I took a few deep breaths. My turn came and I was handed a shot glass by a daper man in a softly light room filled with icons and pictures of angels and guardians. I cast myself on the waters and set my existential compass by orienting my spirit towards the highest concept that I could manage. I emptied my mind and then emptied the little glass into my body. It was bitter and bile-like though not entirely unpleasant. It had a soft burn to it and it left its trace from my tongue all the way down to my stomach. After touching the glass to my forehead I handed it back to the server and I went to my seat. Time as we know it from an organismal perspective is a one-way street. Though the flux of thermodynamic change irrevocably mutates all that we are aware of on an instant to instant basis we still convince ourselves that the room that we left is the same one that we return to. We extend this conceptual sleight of hand to the same day, or the same week, or the same year. We even say that it is the same me when looking at a picture of ourselves from childhood. Somehow the weight of impermanence doesn’t quite sink into quotidian consciousness. But there is something about psychotropics that brings the salient features of impermanence, of having irrevocably crossed a line that can never be retraced, clearly to mind. Once you put them in your body you are committed to the whole trip, come what may. There really is no going back. As you toy with this concept it mutates itself exponentially until you realize that this is it. You are at the leading edge of your life and there is nowhere else to go. Your present moment awareness is the sum total of every conceivable preceeding event and process that we conveniently call the past. The mental functions of I, me and mine along with the infinite conceptual associations cobbled along together with meness begin to momentarily freeze, suspended from their non-conscious and blindly habitual wheelings. If there is nowhere to go then that means that you must have arrived already. An unusual kind of freedom slowly arises out of this paralysis of the monkey mind. It is at once tranquil and extremely deep. It is profound yet exquisitely simple. It is being perfectly attentive to the state of being conscious. It is here that the clear sky mind beings to dawn. These are the shores of the infinite sea of nirvana.
Suddenly someone sneezes or the person next to you asks you what time it is. And suddenly the entire army of crazed monkeys descends thrashing wildly and flinging idiosyncratic banana peels and wads of neurotic feces through the bars of the mental cage. Or better, just as the quiet is settling in one of those vertigoic moments just after ingesting psychedelics bubbles to the surface bringing sundry and garden variety koans like, "…gee, should I really have taken that much?" -or one of my personal favorites, "I wonder if this is the one that I don’t come back from…"
A radical sense of ‘the present moment as all there is’ as well as an extreme dedication to follow, and more important, trust spirit through the experience is most beneficial. There is no sense in fretting about the future when headed into a trip. And worrying about possible negativities complicates the matter making things problematic at best. Fear fills the mental field with seeds of negativity ready to erupt and multiply given the right stimulus. The brain/mind is a pattern seeking and generating machine and when intensely stimulated by psychotropics the proclivity of this machine is to go hog wild. Unless one is particularly interested in taking a larger than life hyper-electric tour of the sewers and charnel grounds of the collective archetypal mind a la Hunter Thompson, it is much better to chill out, take several deeps breaths and chant a few soul saving mantras. I settled into the warrior spirit as the Dime smoldered in my gut, slowly beginning to light an intense fire that nothing could put out.
The attending members congregated in chairs all laid out in an octahedral polygon with the immaculate candle and flower laiden table in the center. The service began with something called the oraciao which was part of a much larger collection of hymns that formed the core of the oral transmission of the church of the Santo Daime. Each hymn was spontaneously channeled from the spirit of the Dime to a recipient who recorded it and then taught others the words and the melody. Most of the hymns came from the predominant leaders of the movement and were songs geared towards disseminating the doctrine, to preaching ethics and conduct, taught about the cosmology of the spirit world, and were also songs of faith and encouragement to the followers. On dance night the entire collection of songs, called the hinario, from a particular lineage would be recited. The entire recitation along with the attendant prayers and sermon sometimes took eleven or twelve hours. Some of the Daimistas, the ones who sat near or at the table itself, sang it in entirety by heart. All of the chants were in Portugese and even if I had had the correct booklet it would have been nearly impossible to follow. The book I had, adorned with a renaissance engraving of the Virgin and Child had other hymns. As the singing went on I read silently through numerous hinarios and filled myself with the vibrations of the church and the doctrine. They were the same collections of songs that Paulo had been singing in the terreiro; hymns to the One Divine God, appeals for guidance and grace, vows for determination and courage, prayers for the collective healing of the souls who are in suffering and who have yet to turn to the Light, and assertions of alliance with protector entities for safety and inspiration. The Juramidam was an example of one of the protector entities and he was the one who looked after the energetic manifestation of the Dime. A kind of strong man at the door. These kinds of entities were called coboklos and apparently there were a lot of them. A name that had been coming up both in the works with Paulo and in the hinario was Ogun. Now there was an interesting character.
To say that the Santo Dime was a hybrid would be a bit of an understatement. Sacramental use of the entheogen ayahuasca trails back in time beyond memory and recorded history, back far beyond the earliest traces of human habitation in the Amazon. Ten, maybe fifteen thousand years ago the earliest inhabitants of North America trickled down from the northern continent following the coastal ranges of the Andes and then hopped over the geographical divide into the deep eastward running river valleys of the Amazon basin. The basin had once been an inland sea which had formed when the Andes rose up millions and millions of years ago. The sea eventually ruptured into the Atlantic leaving behind the largest river network on the face of the planet and a fertile region for the greatest forest to arise. Within that protean forest arose an astonishing amount of biodiversity which became the richest collection of flora and fauna anywhere. The forest was so massive that it became the timing mechanism for global weather patterns as well as a kind of breathing organ producing both tremendous amounts of oxygenated air and a carbon sink which helped to support more plant and animal life all over the planet.
Primal peoples the world over are masters of their physical environment and they possess extraordinary knowledge of the plants and animals of their habitat and the abilities to use them. It is uncertain exactly how early human cultures of the Amazon came to know about the medicinal and sacramental use of the jagube but they did. The original source of this knowledge is rooted in the mythological past of human evolution and will forever be a secret but it is certain that human beings have been utilizing the plant teachers in a symbiotic way to potentiate the greatest evolutionary realm: consciousness. Ritual and shamanic use of psychoactives are part of every indigenous culture throughout time and the world over. This is what the European expansionists found when they arrived in South America in the 1500’s. Of course to the Portuguese Franciscans the indigenous humans of the ‘New World’ were savages, ignorant of proper civilization and were as good as burnt toast, as their souls were yet to have come into contact with the Church of Christ and as such were going straight to hell. So the Indians became the recipients of the twin goad of conversion and enslavement. Lacking steel (for armor and bullets) as well as gunpowder the native people didn’t stand much of a chance. Entire tribes and chiefdoms were exterminated wholesale, then utilized by the invaders as raw materials for their efforts in sugarcane production. But like the Crow, Blackfoot, Iroquois, and Mississippi people to the north the Amazonians were defenseless against the smaller invaders as well. Not having the advantage of developing extensive animal domestication and therefore the hereditary resistance to the numerous kinds of microbes that make the transspecies jump, South American Indians were sitting ducks for epidemics of smallpox and cholera. Vast swaths of human beings, along with their unique languages, culture, and knowledge of the world disappeared within a short time. This rapid evaporation of a labor market as well as the distinct disinterest of the survivors to cooperate with the European efforts to produce sweeteners (and later stimulants and plastics) lead to the exploitation of yet another huge supply of human beings, this time coming from Africa.
By some estimates ten million souls from central and then later West Africa survived capture and transatlantic transport under conditions that defy imagination. The number who didn’t survive is inestimable. When the unlucky ones arrived in the New World as a more robust and durable labor pool they were systematically and methodically divided. It was with great intent that the slavers isolated linguistic and cultural groups so as to prevent any kind of collective will from arising. They were torn from the lands of their birth, broken from their cultures, broken from their tongues and sent into great social isolation to labor under harsh masters, never to receive the bounty of their work. But human nature, imbued with the protean energy of life, is a power that is much stronger than the artificial intent of one group of humans to subdue another. And what began to happen was an amazing thing. Even under the harshest conditions life somehow finds a way to flourish.
One thing that the slavers might not have counted on is that Africa is linguistically dense. Also there is, and must have been in the pre-colonial periods, a tendency for many groups to exchange childbearing women. This has the effect of keeping a genetic stock healthy and diverse but it also has the secondary effect of creating groups that are multi-lingual. In certain regions it is not uncommon to find individuals who speak two, three, even upwards of five different languages largely due to intermarriages and trades exchanges among different tribes. So even though the slaves found themselves geographically and culturally isolated they managed to communicate. Initially through shared native languages and then later through pidgins, creoles and adopted languages the slaves slowly forged and new culture through a radical kind of amalgamation. Along with their tastes in cooking and food flavoring, dance and music, they also brought their concepts of mythology and of worship.
In Africa people from tribes such as the Yoruba and Bantu worshiped, paid homage to and had personal relationships with disincarnate entities called the Orixá (oh-ri-sha). The Orixá are the ancestral clan demiurges who have special powers and specific functions which they exert over the boundaries between the material and spirit realms. Like the angelic entities of the Christian cosmology Orixá are granted powers and status by a distant and all too busy Über God. They are the intermediaries between the Divine and the mortal. Over time their numbers and duties have increased into the hundreds. One such entity is called Exu (Eshoo). He is seen as being black and red while carrying a trident (sometimes associated with the Christian devil). Exu has the role of being the messenger between the Orixá and humans. At birth each person is assigned one or two Orixá. These personal deities are responsible of protection and teaching the human soul the way to navigate the winding path through life. A mortal stands a good chance of keeping up good political relations by making special offerings to the Orixás. Each has characteristic qualities and traits and are seen as inhabiting special environments. Exu is found at cross roads where intersecting paths meet and he seems to be fond of cigars (tobacco having particularly interesting energetic and spiritual qualities). Ogun is the counterpart to the Greek god Zeus. He is the god of war, thunder, and is associated with the metal iron. He brandishes an iron sword and is deep blue in color. He is a shaker and a mover and though a bit hot tempered he is the one to call in order to get things done. Other Orixá are Xango (god of truth and justice), and Oxum (goddess associated with love and the family).
The displaced Africans congregated within the new collective identity of captive slaves in Brazil and the new situation called for a new mode of operation. The African cultural milieu of colonial Brazil mixed and collectively worshiped the transplanted pantheon of entities and deities. Like the indigenous people of South America the newly arriving blacks were expected (coerced and then forced) to adopt Christian ways and beliefs. Outwardly the black slaves obliged and many faithfully adopted the western religion but many other still secretly were praying to their ancestral gods. Behind the backs of their overlords the blacks continued to practice magic and occult ritual in secret. For those still adhering to the cultural traditions the various Orixas were disguised as Catholic saints. This sleight of hand was a necessary survival adaptation but it also showed that the superficial qualities of name and garb of the supernatural entities covered their similar core attributes and capacities. As in the ancient Indus valley the Vedic lila played out, where characters moved about on stage exchanging costumes and masks while engaging in the marvelous dance of mysterious life. This was the inception of the present day Bahian Candomblé, an animistic religion of spirit worship and magic.
But the powerful institutional and political forces of the Catholic church forged distinct divisions between the faithful and clergy where the priests and church fathers became the intermediaries between mortals and divinities and therefore established themselves as middlemen between the faithful and the divine realms. Although Christians in general are actively encouraged to develop personal relationships with the various Saints the relationship echoes the inbred sexual repression and social isolationism that is prevalent in Judeo-Christian cultures. The relationships are long distance affairs characterized by distinct hierarchical divisions. The Candomble on the other hand is more of a bump-and-grind affair and followers are actively encouraged to develop a deep personal relationship with the Orixa. This relationship indeed encourages mediumship and spirit possession as a means of invoking awareness and communication between the energetic realms. Through spirit possession the medium and those socially connected with the medium gain access to insights, teachings, support, warnings and encouragements from the entities. This religious expression then explicitly holds that there are multitudes of disincarnate entities and that they inhabit many different spiritual dimensions, that it is possible for entities to move causally from one realm of manifestation to another, and that a variety of interactions and exchanges between entities are possible and practical; including discourse, infliction of various boons or punishments and various levels of possession from the invited and intentional form of medium channeling to outright demonic possession. All of this is, to say the least, seen as rather suspect from the point of view of the Catholics who hold such concepts and practices as witchcraft, voodoo, and Satanism.
Brazil evolved into an independent state from Portugal and political slavery, though abolished as a governmentally sanctioned practice, was merely subsumed into economic slavery in the late twentieth century. Two of those African descendants, gave birth to a boy they named Irineu. Child of former black slaves, incarnate in Brazil, Raimundo Irineu Serra grew into a physical giant of over seven feet tall. Rubber production was on the rise as the universal applicability of plastics were being appreciated by the modern world. Along with the plantations of coffee, sugar, tobacco, and cacao, rubber tapping was an industry tended by the former slaves and later day immigrants. Along with many other youths seeking a way to survive and acquire physical sustenance Irinue migrated into the Amazona to work the rubber plantations. In the depths of Brazil he was to discover yet another kind of sustenance and one that would lead him into a journey of profound spiritual discovery.
Irineu apprenticed with a Peruvian shaman and was shown the way of the jagube: elixir of the ancient forests, gateway into the spiritual dimensions. Irineu was almost certainly unfamiliar with the inner workings of his biochemistry, at least with regards to the mechanisms and functions that have been charted by the modern science of neurophysiology. He was probably unaware of the causal relationship between the cortical structures of his prefrontal cortex and his capacity of self-awareness, nor was it likely that he could say a lot about the nature of signal propagation along neurons, the development of neural synaptic networks and their capacity for encoding and storing memories, or about the role that neurotransmitters play in the excitation and retardation of neurons and the subsequent effect that has on the content of subjective awareness. Irineu might have been hard pressed to say anything meaningful about tryptamenurgic receptor sites and how there seem to be a lot of them, about the profoundly psychoactive nature of N-dymethyltryptamine (the active ingredient in the vine banisteriopsis caapi, and found in most other fruits and vegetables for that matter), or about the need for potentiating oral DMT use by employing the betacarboline called harmaline because it turns out that the psychedelic properties of DMT were suppressed by the presence of monoamine oxidase, a compound found in abundance in the human digestive tract and thus the need for a MAO inhibitor. And if he had something substantive to say about how the brain generates functional representations of the world and about how exactly psychedelics retool gray matter into producing fantastically altered modes of thought and awareness he would have been eagerly sought after by many modern medical institutions for as yet not a single one can say much about how the brain puts it all together nor about how substances measuring in the millionths of a gram in some cases can cause radical and global alterations in the functions of human consciousness.
What he did have to say was that through the use of the visionary psychotrope Irineu established a relationship with a supernatural entity: the Divine Lady of the Forest. She was the archetypal Mother and the Virgin who had come to set about the inception of the next chapter in the spiritual evolution of humanity. She chose Irinue as the crucible within which to forge a new church. In Irineu the worlds of forest shaman, the deep archetype transplanted from his genetic ancestors from Africa and the over arching spiritual architecture of the Christian religion synthesized, all centering around the ritual use of the visionary sacrament of ayahuasca. Irineu saw himself, quite literally, as a latter day incarnation of Saint John the Baptist, a towering figure among the Fathers of the Desert, who had returned to oversee the second coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. And as it says in the ancient texts that He will come by another name so Irineu was shown by the Mother of la Floresta that Christ had manifested himself as the sacred intoxicant used by the shamans and that His new name was Juramidam. God the Father high in the heavens was calling all of His children home and the Santo Daime (or Sacred Giving) was the catalyst to stir His slumbering and waylaid children into action, into the vital and critical work of breaking free from the karmic and delusional bonds of conditioned existence and return once again to the Source.
By this time I was past the point of being able to read much as there had arisin in my inner vision, competing rather vigorously with my ability to focus on my external vision, a somewhat alarming creature bearing about one hundred red-yellow fluorescent eyes on stalks emerging from a thick and undulating serpentine body. Paulo had been orating for some time in Portuguese and, coming to the end of his talk, he invoked the name of the Holy Trinity. At that moment I had the feeling that some unseen force had taken hold of the fabric that made up all of the physical phenomena in the terreiro and had given it a good snap, like one would use to shake out a dusty rug. A woman on the other side of the alter erupted in a blood curdling scream and simultaneously, all around the church people collapsed and were wracked by spasms and contortions. The heretofore upright shirts and ties fell to the floor scattering chairs and disrupting the orderly symmetry of the lines. Others came to the aid of the stricken by moving away chairs or laying on of hands. Throughout the pandemonium cries of grief, sobs, shrieks of fear, and bone chilling guttural utterances of menacing fury filled the air. This, after all, was a Star Works.
The Star, the star of Solomon, insignia of the union of the heart and the mind, of the creator and the created, of the lover and the beloved, was an emblem of the church, the inner sanctum sanctorum which held the Light. It was from the Light that all things came and it was to the Light that all things return. In these times of accelerated development, of the urgent need for the children to return, drastic measures were needed to attend to the task at hand. One problematic aspect of invoking Light filled angelic entities is that, in this cosmos of polar attributes, you can’t have the Light without the darkness. And the Darkness, it turns out, has been very very busy these last few thousand years. The task then becomes finding a way to reverse the catastrophic chaos that has been inflicted by the forces of the dark. Enter an army of spirit-medium channels versed in BahianAfrican mysticism all revved up on shamanistic jungle-juice and well entrenched in the soteriological schemata of the Judeo-Christian spiritualism of death and rebirth, fall and resurrection, sin and redemption, with the added twist of the Buddhist slant of the transmigration of souls. The Daimistas revoked the doctrine that dammned stay in hell, and in a move that would make a Buddhist proud, sought to actively liberate through conscious invocation souls and entities that have been trapped or lost in the darkness. It is an action of extraordinary insight and of astonishing compassion. After all, how far would you go in order to liberate another soul?
So what do you do when the Devil shows up at the prayer party? The last time he showed up I got to find out what the taste of ash was. Not just any old ash mind you, but the ash that was left over from the scorching of the most sacred of hymns, the Sahasranama, the sacred Sanskrit invocations to the Divine Mother which had been my practice and siddha for ever. That had been my refuge and the trail of bread crumbs left for me to follow back to grace and salvation. Turned to ash and every utterance, every last syllable rendered hollow and as empty, as bleak and as barren as the holes on the dark side of the moon. I sat on a darkened plain of cold soulless stone under a forever darkened sky gutted by heat lightening. I had been forsakened by my protectors and forever banished from the memory of the Light. There in the abyssmal shadowland I knew what it was like to feel utterly alone, and I knew the sickening taste of the kind of insanity that only comes when the last shreds of hope are severed and the heart goes down into a dark and irretrievable smoking ruin. I had, by mistake or design, by destiny or by sheer foolishness, fallen to the upper reaches of hell.
I knew that place. I knew it and didn’t want to go there again. And as it turned out I didn’t have to. So here is one of the greatest gems of the Santo Daime, or at least the version of it that has been passed down from the giant rubber tapper Irineu to Padhrino Sebastiao and then on to Paulo Roberto; when the devil shows up to sing you sing right along and have a knee-slapping good time because it is all about Light. It is a beautiful Light and it is a Light that is there for everyone. And I mean ‘everyone’.
More coconut juice. More singing. More chanting. The Devils retreated to where ever they came from and we were left to our own once again to savor the deeply refreshing jungle air and the cool breeze coming in off of the sea. The DMT high mellowed into a simmering but I was left exhausted and somewhat shaken by the trial. Paulo reached for the light green bottles still holding the bile colored Daime. He half filled a shot glass and looked straight at me with a bit of a mischievous smile and asked, “More?” I couldn’t help but still see a bit of the Devil in him and, hoping that the smile on my face wasn’t too obviously fake, very politely but very firmly refused.
Paulo proposed that we all go for a little stroll in the jungle and we met up on the hill in the atelier where the Dime was made. When the gatherers went out they entered into the deep floresta, the Great Mother from which all life arises, the powerful expanse of living green that is the breathing mechanism of our planet. They found heavy stands of the vine banisteriopsis caapi, the jagube, that living plant which was looked after and protected by the spirit warrior Juramidam. The jagube rooted in the heavy moss and hummus, thick in heavy twining ropes coiling up and up into the canopy, reaching up and up into the air in multiple helices and forever towards the Light. Wet with sweat in the humid jungle the gatherers prayed to the vines and, after asking for and receiving permission from the guardians of the forest, they sacrificed the plant cutting it into manageable sections for transportation.
When the fresh vine arrived it was blessed and then taken first to a room where it was pounded from its tight bundles into fibers for processing. The pounders, in a ceremony called the bateçao used heavy wooden mallets and worked in unison synchronizing their pounding so that the harmonious rhythms of hands, hearts and minds were pounded into the plant. From there the fibers were taken to the stove where water was boiled in huge cooking pots over a gas fire. When Dime was being made teams of fifteen people worked in rotating shifts and the fires roared like jet engines for ten days in a row. The ‘stove’ itself was a foot high concrete platform shaped in the form of Solomon‘s cross. Each point was a burner marked with a roman numeral so that the flow of gas and heat could be carefully controlled by the cook. Other medieval iconography adorned the atelier to provide the right mystical atmosphere, just the right blend of sacred and mythic energies. As the jagube was boiled the psychotria viridis was added as a potentiator so that the tryptamines were sure to be activated to full potential when taken internally. And finally when the brew was done the large vats were cooled and then dumped into great stainless steel troughs to be bottled for storage. Prayers of thanksgiving, of appreciation, of adoration, and sanctification under the power and polarizing force of the Holy Trinity sealed the purification of the Dime making it ready to be used as the active and living sacrament of the church. The true church, the living and breathing temple of Christ was of course the body of the seeker who took the Dime with great reverence in order to enter into the Holy Fire of mystical awareness of the sacred. It was deep in the biochemical neurosynaptic floresta of the spiritual warrior that the true miracle, the wonder of wonders, the most ancient of alchemical conversions took place. It was the conversion of the lead of ordinary consciousness into the shining and awe inspiring gold of spiritual awakening, of entering into the astral, of breaking the conditioned attachments of the ego bound by the heavy material plane and of making the shaman’s leap into the miração. But just as ordinary ore is mined and smelted so it is necessary to laboriously convert the spiritual constitution of the seeker into something that is first manageable, then usable, then appropriate for awakening. Impurities need to be burned away, distortions of the mind and the spirit must be clarified, false conceptions need to be corrected and perceptions must be cleansed. The Dime (and other true entheogens like the Huichol’s psilocin or Nagual’s mescaline) is not a cheat. It is not an automatic ticket to Heaven. It is a teacher and a guide. The Daime, and the other powerful plant teachers, can also be seen as fulcrums that allow us to leverage into states of hyper-lucid super consciousness. This access to hyper-awareness is a of fire amplification and intensification that has extraordinary potential to purify and to enlighten the aspirant by allowing insight and conscious apprehension of the nature of self, of the inner workings of our identity structures, and a greater perspective on our lives and the lives of those around us. This is a process of entering consciously into a profound relationship of concentric circles; the circle of fellow seekers forming the body of the social church, the circle within which stand the guide in the form of a human teacher who has followed the way and the aspirant who seeks the way, the circle of dime and the physical body of the seeker, and the sacred circle of the heart wherein lie the holy of holies, the secret of secrets.
We had been seated for sometime in silent meditation in the atilier when Paulo finally arrived. He stood by the large creased stainless steel table which inclined downwards. “This is where the final Dime comes out and we bottle it. We get to taste it when it is fresh and hot,” and he mimed a shot glass of Dime to his lips with obvious relish on his weathered face. A snapshot of the entire endeavor flashed across my mind: the cosmos evolving into living nature, nature evolving into living sentient beings, the beings becoming self aware and coming to know of a deep relationship between mind expansion and the plant teachers, groups of humans going out into the deep jungles to harvest and then process the plants in difficult and enormously elaborate alchemies, then evolving complex churches with the plant teachers as the central sacrament, the sacrament catalyzing the minds of the followers and allowing for a radical expansion of consciousness into the realm of the divine. Life and mind hyper-evolving itself in a reaching and a kind of return to its beginning place, a return to the garden of perfection, to the source of all things, the created returning to the beginning and re-creating the creator…
“Let’s go up to the terreiro, shall we?” As soon as we began walking into the lush and embracing forest I felt better. My body loosened and my lungs worked the rich fresh oxygenated air in and the acidic metabolic waste gas out of my system. We passed through a stand of thick and wild bamboo. We skirted sinks of soil in the steep slopes that were impassable save for the narrow and vague path. Everywhere life hummed and vibrated. Thoughts of devils and the war of human concepts slowly faded becoming vague and seemingly unimportant. A fantastically blue butterfly floated by on delicate wings, flitting in erratic flight through the tangle of forest. Somewhere in the thickness of green hummingbirds clicked and whirred. We struggled up a steeper section of trail and picked our way around the base of a massive sentinel tree with huge thick flanges at its base. The ancient one looked over the entrance into another tangle of old bamboo. The stalks of heavy reed were all pushed over as if by some great wind a long time ago. Paulo gave orders for some of the others to help with bringing the guitar case through as the way was narrow. We pushed on through the tangled passage, sometimes on hands and knees, as if going through a kind of tunnel, a narrow stricture that was only narrow enough for a clean mind and sincere heart to pass. It was a secret way into the mystical realm of la floresta, an approach into the place of the Ogun and the dwelling place of the Divine Green Mother. I was the last to come through and stood in awe of that place, an inner sanctum hidden away from the confusion and darkness that man was making of the rest of the world.
A spring drained out of the high thick green cliff and the water was crystal clear spilling down through a collecting pool and then on over flattened and eroded rocks to continue its way out of sight through the rest of the jungle. Massive ferns sprouted and everywhere trees grew alive and vibrant. Thousands of shades of green and the late afternoon sun dappling down over the scene of paradisiacal beauty. And looming over the small cove was a guardian stone the size of a small ship, so large and so silent with amazing power and intent as to take the breath away. One by one we stepped up to the dark cistern of pure water and took the heavy folded leaf offered by Paulo. The cool water in the makeshift cup was mesmerizing and at once invigorating and revitalizing. I took the baptismal water and both drank and poured it on my head. I was reborn there in the deep of the wild and living world. ‘Let’s sit in a circle over here,” Paulo gathered us all.
As Kadu picked out melodies on the guitar Paulo sang again. An old man there in the deep of the jungle with a circle of followers. A man who had found his true calling, his deepest mission in life and turned preacher to shepherd others into his vision of spiritual freedom. He sang of courage and determination, of the life lived in the service of the Holy Spirit, of his connection to a deep and long lineage stretching out and back through time beyond the Fathers of the Desert to the dimmest reaches of human memory, and beyond. He sang of Jesus Christ and the Light, of sitting in a clearing in a forest and helping those who are seeking to find themselves and ascend. He sang of the pain and ruin of so many lives and spirits and how the discipline and courage of Path could turn such sorrow and loss to redemption and salvation. He sang of the protectors and of the Archangel Michael guiding and protecting all those who ask and come with a pure heart. He sang of the floresta and to the protecting spirits to help in the work of manifesting the vision. And he sang of the intrinsic relationship between humans and the green world within which they lived, our breath as the breath of the forest, our light as the light of the moon and the sun, our songs as the songs of the birds, of honoring even all of the stars in the distant sky. We sang together acting out a kind of eternal living prayer there in the folds of shimmering green. We sang incantations of blessings and we praised the One Great Life. We honored Life as we were that Life itself. Our voices carried out and were lifted on the rising air into the golden light of the sun. Higher up into the world our prayers floated like flags and the wings of magical birds and beyond the light of the sky another light shone. Subtler and streaming in a kind of deep pleasure, softer than sunlight and luminous coming from that place where the eye of the inner mind looks upward. It was the Light of something watching over us. It was the conscious Light of a pervading awareness. It was a Light of great peace. And it was deeply pleased.
The following are extensive notes, reflections, and recapitulations about the recent work I did with shaman and church leaders I have met here in South America. Life inquiry is intense enough,
but with entheogens it becomes a truly mythic journey. apr 12, 2006
Star Works 1
Going into the Star Works was more difficult than any of the others. My dread was more on the surface. The ceremony we did with Kike in Cuzco was much more relaxed and was prefaced by the reports of how impressive he was as a leader and a musician. All of it proved to be true. The ayahuasca was powerful but not too strong and the visions were gentle, luminous and transparent The first wave was a field of energy and suddenly a brilliant triangle point upwards, floating in space with a hieroglyphic insignia and the emblem of an eye…entities gathered in prayer and then the field opened for the journey. A journey through spatial and temporal geometries of light and meaning. But as intense as the implicit inner journey was, more inspiring were the prayers of such incredible devotion and intensity that I wept at the beauty of it all and came to a new and deeper knowledge and understanding of what prayer was all about and of how to open the heart and to bend down low in the awesome presence of the Light.
But the Star Works were tainted by a previous work that was intensely ferocious. A kind of overwhelming onslaught of internal force and energy that was impossible for me to contain. Impossible to come to terms with and on such a magnitude that I could only take a stand as if in a hurricane of vibration and turbulence. I prayed. The entities that came tried to coax me with all manner of offerings and teases. Two of the more powerful ones lurked pacing back and forth as if just on the other side of a transparent glass wall, frosted but revealing the impatient moving forms. Not malevolent but certainly not entirely trustworthy either. Again and again I refused offers committing my heart only to Jesus and to the One Great Light. It seemed that only after a few moments of being in this storm I was exhausted. I wanted nothing to do with all the confusion, refusing it again and again, reeling in the tidal forces of the experience. The voice of the energy mocked me asking why I had come in the first place if all I was going to do was refuse its presence. All I could reply was that I just wanted to be left alone to pray and to meditate in solitude. More hot electric light, more vibrations and wave after wave of chaotic energetic patterns. More pleas for it to end and to be left in peace, that the only place that I was going to leave my heart -and it did indeed seem that the force was solely intent on rending the very fabric that held together my heart, mind and body…-my only refuge was with The One…more reeling and struggling and finally all I could do was to relinquish my resistance. Though my intent never willfully let go of my heartspace, never abdicated my place on the throne of my being, I could only at last but lay down in this battle and breath my last breaths as I slipped into the field. The field of the Daime that received me graciously enough and began a secret inner dialogue in a language of colors and deep marvelously intricate multidimensional geometries of meanings and forms. Once again I found myself in a process where my intent and my resolve were being tested, in an intense challenge where I was stripped down to the bare and taken to a place where I could but only continually forge a contract with the Path. It was a test that required great intention and immense resolve. And it was a testing that would never end, only to be repeated over and over, passing through level after level.
My attention snapped back to the room flipping instantly from a dimension of profound cosmic geometries to Paulo‘s study high in the hillside jungles on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. Through the picture window the edifice Piedra de Gávea, solid granite some thee thousand feet high, stood towering massive and sublime into the heights above the lush greenery and the Atlantic behind. Paragliders were taking their noon jumps riding the currents of rising air like so many delicate brightly colored leaves drifting with great intent on the breath of God. Paulo was in his chair holding his rosary in both hands, deep in concentration and wheeling incantations with machine-like focus and profound concentration. Portuguese syllables rolled slowly out of his mouth directing the energies of mind and intent into the cosmic realm in a transcendental architecture of divine construction. “Ghesuishhhhh,” a pause and then again…“Ghesuishhhh,”. Again and again and then “Ghesuishhh Krishtoh….Ghesuishhh Krishtoh.” Invocations of the Lord Jesus Christ. Incantations of awesome energies. My fellow companions engaged in the works were in their chairs, eyes closed in deep meditation, some barely whispering the mantras. To me the four others appeared calm and collected. Of course I was the only one going through the torment of the inner fire. I had slipped down to the ground in a modified child’s pose, draped over myself with arms outstretched and forehead against the floor. Sweat dripping. “Ghesuishh Krishtoh…,” I whispered trying to grasp hold of the delicate thread that ran through my memory. I reeled in more tides of energies as the gravitational forces of the Daime competed with external reality for supremacy. Floating back and forth, into and out of the visionary state…just wanted to sit alone and in peace…
Paulo brought the round to a close and I had it together enough to clearly and with intent recite the closing invocation in the name of the Holy Trinity. Gratefully I took advantage of drinks of cool coconut juice. And even more gratefully I took the chance to grasp hold of rationality through the interactions with the others. But the small island of graciousness evaporated rapidly as the dimethyltryptamine still surging through my bloodstream was yet to give up all of its fire. Having qaffed Paulo launched into a round of hinarios, top of the lungs, goat-hoof rattle mechanically pounding away in his left hand, his just-do-it mortar and stone baritone beat a path through the illusion and the miasma of conditioned existence, through the lifetimes of defilements and of wandering senselessly without the word of the Gospel. He sang of the glories of the One God and of His Imperial realm. He sang of the protecting angels and of the safety into which leads the path of the righteous. He sang of the indoctrinations necessary for souls to enter the Kingdom and of the narrow opening through which they must pass. All of it repetitious, all of it couched in simplistic and almost unbearably awkward phrasings as if written by drunken schoolchildren, and all of it like insane monkeys with huge trashcan lids pounding flagrantly against the painfully raw membranes where my DMT tuned inner ear turned into gray matter, turned into inner experience, turned into another round of hot electric insane energizer-bunny light, more vibrations and wave after wave of chaotic energetic flux. My mind flashed through several planes of consciousness, each one a distinctly unique kind of reality, in rapid succession and all I could capture of it was the reeling sensation of having been unplugged as if in some Matrix movie. That it seemed so real brought a tinge of terror to the experience. If I was being unplugged then what was I being unplugged into? And who was doing the unplugging? No time to process as the wheeling continued and snap!…back into the room where a mad-man was bellowing nursery school catechisms like a cow. But as torturous as was the new round of electric inner-light, it was the flag waving, goose stepping, and ‘indoctrinations’ that put me nearly over the edge (the actual edge would come in a minute)…My whole body irked at the sensation of someone trying to shovel a pre-baked ideology down my throat. I tried with my might to be patient but behind every phrase, behind every stanza lurked the hypocrisy of the human attempt to codify the perennial philosophy for mass consumption, the attempt to torture the ephemeral and elusive nature of the Path into concepts and language that could withstand transmission in apprehendable language. The glories of the Divine Imperial Way became a highway off-ramp trap of narcissistic fascism. What was implicitly offered as the way to teach souls to evolve and to transcend the endless labyrinth of conditioned illusion became just another version of the infinite labyrinth of shadows as minds and delicate spirits were coaxed by dreams of light filled heavens and endless peace but were really converted into soldiers of a dark army. The once willing, lured as moths by the brilliant lights and the displays of healing and magic, became conscripts who were entrapped before they realized what was happening. Unable to break away from the overpowering force of the Imperial and dominating God and His Realm of fearsome angels, souls were turned to warriors who were then unleashed against all who refused to follow the path, swept into chasms of ruin and endless torment. The CNN military news network, the Disney dream-machine, the Coca-Cola sugar puff altzhiemers bulldozer, the republican right prayer-party white supremicist bible barfing with-us-or-against-us stealth bomber NSA FBI CDC toss a nuke on Iran and get the Armageddon party going specter raised its scaly heads and was dripping saliva down the back of my neck. And then to make things really interesting, as I was staring at Paulo trying to fathom what it was that he was frothing about his skin turned a few shades too dark and his thick dark curly hair turned a bit more dark and curly, his flesh became more fleshy and distinct points suddenly popped out along the tops of his ears. The goat-hoof rattle in his left hand pounded out a incessant wracheting and I yanked my eyes shut as the Devil Himself showed up to ring the dinner bell and pop off the gun to sound the beginning of the end. My panic shot my heart rate through my mouth and I’ll be damned if the mother-fucker hadn’t managed to find me again.
