by Ross Heaven
At the end of the ceremony we return to the circle to share what we have learned and to close the mesa. Sharing experiences can be an important part of people’s healing. I close the ceremony by cleansing the space and participants with smudge, making a silent closing prayer, and giving thanks for the day.
ADVICE FOR THE JOURNEY
It is important to have an intention when participating in a ceremony. However, the answers we seek may not always be what we have expected, because the medicine may redirect our experience to the root of our real problems. This we need to accept.
It is best is to stay centered throughout the day without getting attached to any of the experiences we have, but instead staying open and paying attention to whatever may come. If you find yourself stuck in a loop or a mind trap, thinking the same thoughts over and over again, snap out of it! Same thing if you find yourself enchanted by beautiful visions so much so that you drift away too far: get back to your intention and work!
The mind, which so often acts out of fear, will sometimes try to distract you from getting closer to the core of your being. This distraction may come as doubts, fear, ridiculing your process, or judging yourself or others. This fear doesn’t want to die, so it will do whatever it can to hang on. Don’t be fooled by it. Be strong and persistent and detach from it.
Wachuma is not just another recreational drug. When we drink it we go on a mission to learn important things about ourselves, to heal ourselves and others, and to awaken to our fuller potential. The spirit of the plant will only reveal its secrets to sincere and humble seekers. You need to build a good relationship with it in the same way as you build good relations with animals and humans. Our whole life experience is very much determined by our relationships. Everything is alive and everything has spirit and that spirit is what connects us with the oneness of all creation.
In preparation for a journey certain dietary restrictions are also important, such as abstaining from alcohol, drugs, and meat the day before and after the ceremony, and to fast on the day of the ritual itself.
Some traditional shamans also insist on abstinence from sex. I think that sex between partners in a harmonious and established relationship isn’t necessarily contraindicated, but the man should avoid ejaculating if having sex the day before a ceremony. The reason for this is that men lose vital energy by emptying the semen. I actually think it can be beneficial for couples to be intimate before a ceremony, however, if they want to work on strengthening their relationship. On the other hand, if you intend to work on personal issues only, then it’s better to maintain your own space and not take on energies from your partner before you work with the medicine.
The work during ceremony requires glucose as fuel for the brain, and the body may need extra water to help flush out toxins that get released in a purge. Fruit should be at hand from three hours into the journey together with herbal tea and drinking water throughout the day. However, we eat as little as possible, as eating can be a trick of the mind to suppress emotions and disturb the medicine and its work.
On a deeper three-day retreat we drink three doses of wachuma per day and don’t eat at all, and drink only the minimum amount of water unless medical conditions are contradictory. This is the ultimate way for profound inner work as it keeps the body’s systems open and breaks down the mind’s defenses so we surrender more deeply to the medicine, but it is not for the beginner. An intense journey like this may also require up to three or sometimes six months of integration work so that things fall into place before the next medicine journey.
POSTCEREMONY INTEGRATION
Integration work after (or between) ceremonies is essential to be able to successfully function in our daily lives. We must work to understand what the medicine has shown us and how to use the lessons in everyday situations. Wachuma helps us to heal diseases and to make us aware of our harmful thought patterns of negativity, delusion, and ignorance. The medicine gives us the keys and a little push, but we must use our free will and determination to complete the work.
Some of our discoveries may feel abstract and difficult to comprehend, because we experience them in an altered state of consciousness. Writing, drawing, painting, singing, or other creative expression is therefore helpful in the integration process. It is also a good idea to set up an action plan based on the insights you have received about how to get where you want to be, and it is best to stay away from situations and people who don’t support or resonate with your process until you have established a new platform to act from. When we are strong enough and feel solid enough to face the world and exercise our new way of being, we should then do so and enjoy the dance of life.
Wachuma is very clear in pointing us in the right direction, but we need to walk by ourselves to get where we want to be, and there is no point in continuing to drink the medicine if we don’t seriously want to do the work. We won’t get any further, and instead we will build up piles of unfinished tasks. The teaching of wachuma is to take one step at a time and to find a resolution so we don’t need to struggle with the same issues over and over again.
A FEW LAST WORDS
I wish for as many people as possible to have the opportunity to meet this beautiful medicine in the correct way. Most pharmaceuticals only treat symptoms that appear on the surface, but wachuma and other plant medicines can heal our souls and cure the reasons for diseases and suffering.
Wachuma reconnects us with the core of our being and brings us back to oneness with all creation. It helps us to awaken from the haze of illusion and ignorance, to see beyond the fear and conditioning that have formed our ego, bringing us home to our true nature and helping us peel off the layers of pain and fear surrounding our hearts. It opens the doors to deeper love and understanding.
Wachuma wants to bring us back to the lost paradise of Earth and invites us to join the joyful dance of life.
It is an exciting time we are living in now. Humanity is awakening to a higher consciousness and the sacred medicine of our elders is becoming more accessible to modern civilization. This may play a vital part in the reawakening of many confused or lost souls in our modern world. With this transition comes the responsibility to work with wachuma in a responsible way, not to abuse it in the same way as we have tobacco, marijuana, poppy, and other sacred plants. We must be mindful and treat plants as living beings, not just commodities to be bought, sold, and manipulated.
We must take full responsibility for our lives with our hearts and minds open, walking humbly with an awareness that we are part of a bigger picture. We are all one.
Thank you wachuma, sacred medicine, for bringing us home.
PART TWO
The Western Mind
Life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego.
TERENCE MCKENNA
THE WESTERN PERSPECTIVE on San Pedro will inevitably be different from that of the shamans working in Peru, immersed in the culture and seeing the breakthroughs achieved each day by their patients as a result of the plant and its healing powers.
Westerners have different needs and often different intentions than Peruvians. While it is typical for the latter to approach ceremonies with very practical questions, concerns, and healing needs, it seems that Westerners arrive with the baggage of their culture and with many doubts, fears, anxieties, and emotional issues to work on.
Wade Davis and Peter Furst have written about San Pedro ceremonies they attended where Peruvian participants had questions about their businesses and how to improve them, or wanted to know who had stolen money from them, or had a definite health issue, a problem located in the body that they wanted San Pedro to cure. By contrast, the participants who join me for ceremony in Europe or who arrive from other Western countries to attend my healing trips to Peru seem sick at the level of the soul. They are grieving, uncertain, lost, or confused and, in whatever particular way it manifests, they are unhappy and no longer in love with life or with themselves. S
hamans call conditions like this soul loss. And when the soul is missing it is not just a spiritual, emotional, or mental crisis (although it is all of these things too), it can lead to very real physical problems.
After years of working with people like this—and feeling many of their afflictions myself —I am convinced that this is a cultural as much as a personal issue. In the West we often have no one “real” to talk to, we have lost our communities, our families are broken, and we have become disconnected. This can only make our problems worse, for when overwhelmed by grief, anxiety, or loss, where is the anam cara, “the soul friend,” we can confess to and relieve the pressures within us that are making us ill? From where can we take good, objective advice or counsel that does not have an agenda of its own or a fee at the end of it?
Having witnessed many of the healing miracles that San Pedro can perform and that La Gringa also mentions, I am convinced of something else too: that the Western world desperately needs the help of San Pedro—to reconnect us, to make us whole again, to let us know we are loved so we are able to truly give and receive love.
Thankfully, we are beginning to take a new interest in the potential of this plant, so perhaps the day is not so far away when San Pedro will be better known and more available to those who need it. In this section we hear from some of the Westerners who are assisting the spread of this knowledge.
Eve Bruce, M.D., was a board-certified medical doctor in the United States with more than two decades of experience and memberships in numerous medical societies, including the American College of Surgeons and the American Board of Plastic Surgeons. She has appeared on “Medical Breakthroughs” for CNN Headline News, the Learning Channel, Lifetime Live, and the Discovery Channel and has been featured in magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar, Health, Natural Health, and Healthy Living. She then had a healing breakthrough of her own, and became a shamanic initiate as the first non-Quechua woman to be inducted into the Circle of Yachaks or Birdpeople Shamans of the high Andes. In the article that follows she speaks of her journey into shamanism and of the plants that have helped her to heal and heal others: ayahuasca and San Pedro.
David Luke, Ph.D., is a British university professor carrying out pioneering work with San Pedro in the study of ESP states and precognition. It is his firm belief that the cactus is able to overcome the effects of the “reducing valve” of the brain, removing our filters to information in order to expand our consciousness. In his article he reviews the evidence and reports on a unique experiment of his own into precognition.
Morgan Maher is a writer for Daniel Pinchbeck’s Reality Sandwich new consciousness magazine. Here he conducts a wide-ranging interview with me that covers the history of San Pedro, its healing potential, its similarities and differences to ayahuasca, the “message of the plants,” and the role of teacher plants in human evolution.
5
The Anaconda and the Hummingbird
Sacraments of the Lowland Rain Forest and the Highest Mountains
Technologies for Ascended Wisdom and Consciousness
Eve Bruce, M.D.
The dwelling of my Father
Is in the heart of the world
Where all love exists
And there is a profound secret.
This profound secret
Is within all Humanity
If all will know themselves
Here, inside the truth.
I have taken this drink
It has incredible power,
It demonstrates to all of us
Here in this Truth.
I have climbed, I have climbed, I have climbed
I have climbed with joy
When reaching the Heights
I encountered the Virgin Mary.
I have climbed, I have climbed, I have climbed
I have climbed with love
I have encountered the Eternal Father
And the Redeemer, Jesus Christ.
Daime force, Daime light
Daime love!
Daime . . . the teacher of all teachers.
HYMN FROM SANTO DAIME FOUNDER
MESTRE IRINEU SERRA*25
It has been postulated that the beginnings of spirituality—the notion that there is a great deal more beyond this physical life—began countless eons ago with the assistance of plant entheogens. Evidence of this shift in consciousness can be found in our ancestors’ artistic renditions of their visions on cave walls. Graham Hancock in his book Supernatural eloquently explores this, meticulously detailing the “otherworld” through accounts of visionary experiences from ancient times to the present, comparing current visionary descriptions with the images found in rock art.1
This “otherworld,” it would appear, has changed over time, developing alongside of the everyday world that some call “reality.” Frequented by our ancestors long past, these other dimensions were found to be healing and informative. Indeed, the world beyond our gross receptive bodies appears to have long provided a path to being able to transcend, transform, and expand our existence by giving us powerful, pragmatic tools that can be used to assist in both basic survival and in pondering the mysteries of our existence.
Cave paintings of forty thousand years ago involved abstract images and patterns, and are in essence the same as the visions that we see today when communing with these plant teachers. Although we were anatomically fully evolved some two-hundred thousand years before this time, the fact that there was remarkably no change noted in what is found in archaeological remains through the vast reaches of human existence before the beginnings of rock art, and an exponentially rapidly changing vista of human patterns of existence and thought since then, is a magnificent testimony to these plants usefulness to us.
And yet at some point this otherworld became co-opted by religious intermediaries in an endless power play. Direct communication and communion with the otherworld was forbidden in the “developing” world, first by vilification and law, and then by the most effective method of all—ignoring its existence. The rise of the material world at the altar of science has removed this otherworld from our lives and placed it in the realm of the ridiculous, of fantasy, explaining it away by the chemical reactions in our very material brains. The imaginal has become synonymous with the imagined.
Whatever your stance on this, it seems clear that from the time of our earliest musings on the nature of life, humans developed ways of interfacing with these mystical realms, and that at some point this most democratic leveler of communities and wisdom became relegated to the few. Despite rapid advances of material knowledge in the way of science, many find themselves disconnected and lost. Where did we make a turn that took us away from our connection with and empowered assistance from the divine nature of life on this planet?
Luckily for us there are still pockets of peoples who have evolved along a more connected and sacred path of oneness, for if there is a universal shamanic cosmology throughout Mother Earth it is that of our interconnectedness, of the great web that links us all—whether embodied, disembodied, or never embodied. This is the notion of ecstatic one-ness—the samadhi state explored in the yoga sutras (with the assistance of plants through the use of soma), and in many parts of the world this state is attained and sustained through the use of sacred plant medicines—the entheogens.
For over fifteen years I have been honored to have had the mission of taking groups to these pockets of indigenous peoples in remote communities so that we might vision with sacred entheogens. As witness to hundreds of peoples’ communions, along with my own personal relationship with these plant spirits, I have been blessed with great access to the mysteries of how they interact with and heal us, and to the knowledge that in some ways no two interactions are the same—and in some ways they are all exactly the same.
As physical beings our spirit is aware of the world around us through our body’s tightly gated and censored sensory organs and their pathways, all of which are highly limited as to which spectrum of energies we can perceive. We
all know of the existence of the ultraviolet and infrared light spectrum and are also aware that with the limitations of our eyes’ perceptive abilities we are not able to see these light rays. We are also aware of the existence of sounds that are above the frequency that our ears can hear. We are familiar with and comfortable with the fact that we can only perceive a fraction of what is around us, and that in addition to this limitation, at any point in time we can only be aware of a small fraction of that which we are capable of perceiving. This small portion of the All is our consciousness—our “reality.” How arrogant can we be to even hypothesize that our very limited sensations can begin to know the whole of reality even in the physical world, let alone the nonphysical.
Some of us are blessed to have spontaneous openings in this shell of our beingness, those magical moments when we know we are simultaneously both huge and miniscule, both a vital miracle of immense universal source and an impossibly small part of this vastness. Both part and whole. And so we strive for ways of reaching beyond our limited world to find that experiential peek at infinity, of methods to enhance our perception of the “supernatural”—and thus to expand our reality—to remind ourselves of our nonphysical existence and of the web of connectedness. We search for any way that can reach out and expand our consciousness—meditation, ascetic practices, fasting, chanting, drumming, repetitive dance movements, hyperventilation.
One of the oldest and most consistently useful methods known to man—and to animals I might add—is through the use of entheogenic plant medicines.
As a physician and scientist I am continually amazed by how consistently useful these plants are. I am also aware of how—in a way—they are also inconsistent. In other words, the experiences of people using these sacred medicines always hold something of profound usefulness for each person, enabling them to open to their interconnectedness with the All, to expanding their notion of reality and by doing so to raising their consciousness by the similarities in visionary patterns, scenarios, and information. Also by the repeatedly experienced songs and even dances that each plant gifts to us with relative frequency. These are the consistencies and these consistencies cross wide cultural and environmental boundaries. As mentioned above, these consistent patterns even span the length of millennia as seen in European, Australian, and African rock art of some thrity-five thousand to forty thousand years ago. Are these patterns in the plants themselves or in us as receivers of and sifters through these visionary gifts? In our brain’s anatomy? In our brain’s chemistry? Or in the otherworld that we have trouble perceiving without the assistance of these teacher plants.
