I’m Working… I Swear

Wow, so far this has been crazy for reasons I never would have expected. I mean what I expected was to see a bunch of animals and insects in the jungle. To be honest so far I haven’t really seen much at all but I’m not even disappointed about it.

My original guide Walter spoke a bit of english but on the boat ride out here he decided to announce that he was basically going to drop me off with a guide friend of his and come back in two days… At first I was pissed but then I got over it.

Turns out I like this guide he left me with way more. His name is Lucho and he lives out here in the jungle with his wife and four kids. By the way I’m pretty sure his 17 year old daughter was flirting with me, gross/hawt.  Anyways, he only speaks spanish and the local dialect so sometimes I have to pretend I understand him. He’s always pointing at animals and saying the names and I never know what I’m looking for until I see it.

He’s a really nice guy though, very real and simple. His father was a shaman and taught him everything about the medicinal plants in the jungle. He said he might try the ayahuasca with me tomorrow which would be a pleasant surprise since I’m a bit scared to do it alone.

I asked him how people originally learned about the medicinal value of the different plants and his answer was interesting, “the jungle tells them”. He said the people will go on a special diet and go out to the jungle for a long time and then come back knowing about the medicines.

Cool story.

I also asked him what the scariest thing that’s ever happened to him in the jungle and his answer was so strange. I expected like jaguar attack or alligator mauling or something but instead he described these evil spirits that are in the jungle. He said he’s been out here a few times alone and these spirits will fly across the air or they will just follow him in his boat. Apparently they are lost souls who died in the jungle and continue to roam terrorizing people.

The images he conveyed to me were terrifying so I had to comfort myself by remembering I don’t believe in spirits or gods or life after death.

Its really hard though to be so negative about the spiritual world with the types of things that have been happening to me lately. The san pedro ceremony and just hearing some of these stories and how convinced people are that they’re real.

As much as I want to believe in the spirit world and gods and such… my rationality stops me.

On another note his sons are really friggin’ cute. Contrast to the devil child on that Panamanian boat I was on, these kids will come up to me while I’m reading my kindle and just stare at it in amazement. They get so much joy from it when I just let them push the next page button once I’m done reading a page. They are so patient to they will just sit and wait until I’m done with the page and won’t be annoying at all. I hope my kids are like that. I can tell they have awesome imaginations because the one kid was amusing himself by just pretending to push buttons, so funny. Oh and they’ll just stand next to me and like pet my head and put their arm around me for some reason, its hilarious.

Its so nice being inside a mosquito net hammock with NO INSECTS inside it. I only had to destroy two when I got in.

My entire body is like on fire with bites right now its amazing.

I’m excited for ayahuasca tomorrow night. I’m also excited to go home and see that girl I like.

I’m also getting more and more ideas about how to give my mom LSD in a productive way both from my experience with the shaman and from that book I’m reading which is terribly interesting.

Andrew out.

Spending the night out in the jungle camping was actually a very pleasant experience. Just being here makes me realize how disconnected I really am with a simple life. I trip walking through the jungle and my stomach is always upset, I dread having to go to the bathroom because of the uncomfortableness of it all. Although it is nice at times I feel demoralized by the fact that if I was out here alone walking for more than a minute I would probably get lost and die. Meanwhile my guide is able to take me walking for an hour in the jungle to show me things and somehow knows exactly how to get back to our campsite in the pitch black darkness.

I guess the complete emasculation is part of it all. Although it wouldn’t really be that enjoyable I think it would really grow me as a person to come out here for two weeks or a month and spend a long time in the jungle just learning how to survive with just a few things. The type of camping they do here makes camping at home look like living in a mansion. They get by with less in their daily lives than we do with our camping gear now that I think about it.

Lucho took me for a cool hike this morning showing me all of the different medicinal plants in the jungle and sampling some. He only showed me a few but I swear they must have something for every purpose. Apparently they can cure diabetes? The weird thing is that there are some that aren’t simple and you have to wonder about the story he told about the jungle instructing them how to use the plants. There was one that was like pull the plant up, in the roots there’s like a potato type bulb. Boil the bulb, and them you can wrap it against a snake bite to pull the poison out from it. I mean seriously you don’t just figure that type of thing out my trial and error.

Lucho is a really nice guy, I have trouble understanding him most of the time but maybe that’s part of why I like him. He told me about how he wants to do this type of work on his own and be his own boss so to speak. I said maybe I could help by making him a website and getting his email sorted out so people could find him and contact him. It really wouldn’t be much time or money for me to make and host a website for him and maybe it would give him more income and independence in his work.

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I’ve been trying to prepare myself both physically and psychologically for this whole evening. The book I’ve buried my head in for the last few days and am almost to the end of is incredibly interesting and is a strange companion to the weird spiritual stories I’ve been hearing this week, and, which is very unlike me, partially buying into.

I was just reading about the author tell a story of how he felt a poltergeist entered his apartment after a hard DPT (dipropyltryptamine a DMT analogue) trip. Could it be that enough experimentation with these plants and chemicals opens your mind to the spirit world on a more real level? I always thought my porn star Buddhist friend was a bit insane for thinking she had a ghost in her apartment and could physically see peoples auras but, maybe the amount of entheogenic exploration she has done has given her a permanent window into whatever other realm or dimension might exist. Or her brain is just fried.

The more I think about it the more perplexed I am by the fact that there are plants that produce incredibly complex chemicals that produce hallucinations and visions in men that are incredibly complex and eye opening.

More than that, in regards to ayahuasca, why did indians ever decide to boil these two plants together and consume them? I suppose that separately each of them might have some small effect and they tried the combination? Regardless its still mind blowing.

I still can’t believe that I’m going to be drinking this fluid with a woman from Spain and a 17 year old daughter of Lucho, perhaps Lucho as well.

I went to the bathroom and I am having serious doubts at my ability to locate it while high, much less coordinate hovering over the tiny whole in the ground. I guess ill cross that bridge when and if I come to it. For those of you that don’t know one of ayahuascas normal effects is constant vomiting and diarhea. Fun!

The sky here is so clear, there’s so many stars. I like the place we are going to do this in. Its a house with no walls but a roof. We each have our hammocks with our mosquito nets around them. I hope that if I don’t get sick I can just lay in my hammock and close my eyes and have my visions. With some luck…

Trip Repor furst ataguaca experience:

All of us were on the floor of the room that was actually the place they cook all of our food in. They closed it up as best they could because they said darkness makes the visions easier to achieve.

I first drank the fluid along with two chaser type things designed to take the taste away. It was a pretty horrible taste but sadly I’m accustomed to this kind of thing. At first I really didn’t feel much of anything at when he asked what I was feeling I exaggerated and said “nothing, can I have some more?”

After that second helping I felt like I was on the brink of overwhelming insanity… I closed my eyes and started seeing weird colorful patterns of every color.

Suddenly then my Dad was there and I was having the talk with him I want to have when I get home. He seemed slightly disappointed but understood.

About 2 hours in a threw up in the provided vomit pan. The two girls next to me were throwing up almost the entire time. My only complaint was that it made my own concentration difficult to maintain.

I went through talking to all the people I wanted to talk to when I got home. It was like a dream, They responded to my questions how I felt they might. I guess in someway it was a bit of rehearsal for when the proper time comes.

The drug was incredibly hard on my coordination. I tried to get up to go to the bathroom and fell onto my knees. Someone had to guide me right to somewhere I could use as a bathroom.. It was absurd.

Finally, after more chanting and seeing shit we all went to our hamocks to sleep. My coordination was obliterated, I fell onto the floor trying to sit on the hammock while zipping up the net. At that point everything was fading away, I never got to see the insightful visions that ayahuasca is famous for.

Ill dread trying it again considering the awful taste and constant nausea.

Quite honestly though I’ve never experienced such an intense and overwhelming feeling from taken something like this. I recall opening my eyes and looking around the room and just feeling the overwhelming a motor skill failure similar to salvia.

Still though after reading that shamanism book I can’t help but wonder the those drugs just play tricks on our brain, or… Are they really  allowing us to see another dimension of existence.

Even today weird things still linger for me. Up until just about now I had totally lost the ability to read anything closer that one meter from my face. It was absurd but the Shaman said that was normal and would revert back after some time. After a painstaking journey I finally ended up back at the five dollar hostel (it felt like a five star resort at that point). I bought a couple pieces of cake from next door because they hadn’t given me lunch. As I slowly ate it while sitting on my bed I noticed the crumbs on the floor seemed to move, as if they had some kind of unstable electrical charge to them. Beyond that as I was writing my notes this morning the letters at the beginning and end of the words I typed were blue and red respectively. It was just odd to me that the effects lasted so long after, I feel as if the ayahuasca opened my mind up to a more subtle reality that I didn’t see before. Or maybe I just took too much.

For the first time under the influence I felt out of control, today I just feel humbled by the  incredible power the ayahuasca had to wreck my physical body and my mind.

Definitely something you couldn’t do often but something that everyonet the stomach for a mind bending experience should try. Now its time for me to fly home and go back to my normal life… if that’s possible.