I am at a point in my search for knowledge - the subject of this blog - where I find myself alternating between two strongly-held positions.

One the one hand, I want to prepare naturally for any mystical experiences, alternate realities or contact with The Other that might be within me by employing ancient methods of self-discipline like meditation and yoga. The downside (if there ever is a downside) is that these methods take a long time to achieve their goal - by which time you realize that there should be no goal and that to have a goal is merely a function of ego and not of spirit. Beyond this realization, there is a good possibility that any goal like this will not be achieved in a single lifetime.

In lieu of waiting a number of future incarnations to achieve Buddha Enlightenment, there is another side of me wants to achieve this as quickly as possible, and the quickest way I know of in this lifetime - save for getting struck by lightning or suffering a complete psychotic break - is through the use of psychedelics.

Achieving this thing I'm after, then, is like the fabled race between the tortoise and the hare. While in the long run, the much slower tortoise will finish the race, it's quite a temptation to bet on the swift hare to get to the finish line first. Of course, to twist this metaphor around, there's no assurance that the tortoise will finish the race at all before he dies. So he would have to be born again and again and again to finally reach the finish line.

But goddammit! I'm a middle-class American, and as such was born and raised with the idea that I deserve to have it all. What's more, I deserve to have it all NOW!.

I've already written about my experience with meditation - played in this scenario by the tortoise. My experience here has been defined by fits and starts over the past thirty-five years or so.

Occasionally during that time, however, and especially in the past year since attending the World Psychedelic Forum, I've toyed with the idea of seeing what life is like from the hare's point of view. So on two different occasions in the past year, I've actually tried the hare's quick way to Enlightenment with two different psychedelic plants.

The Doors of Perception

The first time I experienced psychedelics was in a shamanic healing ceremony a number of months ago. The substance I took during that ceremony is called variously San Pedro Cactus, Huachuma, Wachuma, Achuma and even Cactus of the Four Winds. It, like peyote, is a indigenous medicinal plant that contains the psychedelic molecule, Mescaline.

Mescaline! Cool!

This is the hallucinogenic substance contained in peyote that Carlos Casteneda used to discover A Separate Reality on his Journey to Ixtlan through The Teachings of Don Juan, Casteneda's legendary brujo or shamanic sorcerer.

While much has been written by now about the questionable authenticity of Don Juan Matus and therefore Casteneda's entire series of anthropologically-based books, there is no doubt that they were the impetus for innumerable people around the world to begin searching for the own Ixtlan using psychedelics.

Fifteen years before Casteneda's first book was published, however, a seminal book was written that would bring a re-enchantment to the West; that is, an imperative for artists, writers, poets and other intellectuals to experience psychedelics.

The book was called The Doors of Perception (full online version), and it's author was the esteemed writer Aldous Huxley: author of Brave New World and The Perennial Philosophy among many important literary works.

The title for the book The Doors of Perception came from William Blake's , The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, wherein he wrote:

If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.

The Doors of Perception is Huxley's account of his own Mescaline trip. He described his introduction to the substance this way:

By a series of, for me, extremely fortunate circumstances I found myself, in the spring of 1953, squarely athwart that trail [of a chemical basis for mental illness]. One of the sleuths had come on business to California. In spite of seventy years of mescalin research, the psychological material at his disposal was still absurdly inadequate, and he was anxious to add to it. I was on the spot and willing, indeed eager, to be a guinea pig. Thus it came about that, one bright May morning, I swallowed four-tenths of a gram of mescalin dissolved in half a glass of water and sat down to wait for the results.

He wrote that his goal was to "change my ordinary mode of consciousness as to be able to know, from the inside, what the visionary, the medium, even the mystic were talking about."

So what did Huxley experience?

Like all psychedelics, Mescaline is a psychotomimetic -a drug that tends to produce symptoms similar to those of psychosis. The idea of learning about these disturbances from the inside was an intriguing idea for researchers and psychonauts like Huxley in the 40's and 50's.

Here he speaks about the "mad" wife of an old friend who had been diagnosed as schizophrenic.

One day in the early stages of the disease, when she still had her lucid intervals he had gone to talk to her about their children. She listened for a time, then cut him short. How could he bear to waste his time on a couple of absent children, when all that really mattered, here and now, was the unspeakable beauty of the patterns he made, in this brown tweed jacket, every time he moved his arms? Alas, this Paradise of cleansed perception, of pure one-sided contemplation, was not to endure. The blissful intermissions became rarer, became briefer, until finally there were no more of them; there was only horror.

Most takers of mescalin experience only the heavenly part of schizophrenia. The drug brings hell and purgatory only to those who have had a recent case of jaundice, or who suffer from periodical depressions or a chronic anxiety. If, like the other drugs of remotely comparable power, mescalin were notoriously toxic, the taking of it would be enough, of itself, to cause anxiety. But the reasonably healthy person knows in advance that, so far as he is concerned, mescalin is completely innocuous, that its effects will pass off after eight or ten hours, leaving no hangover and consequently no craving for a renewal of the dose. Fortified by this knowledge, he embarks upon the experiment without fear - in other words, without any disposition to convert an unprecedentedly strange and other than human experience into something appalling, something actually diabolical.

For some eight or ten hours, then, Huxley experienced "only the heavenly part of schizophrenia" and recorded his impressions of both the outer world as well as the inside of his own mind; the latter being by far the more interesting read. He would later transcribe his experience to paper in minutest detail.

Being the intellectual he was, Huxley examined every part of his experience and related it to mind events such as his encyclopedic knowledge of art. Here is an example of the first picture he looked at in an art book he found at "the world's largest drug store" in Los Angeles.

I picked up the first volume that came to hand. It was on Van Gogh, and the picture at which the book opened was "The Chair" - that astounding portrait of a Ding an Sich, which the mad painter saw, with a kind of adoring terror, and tried to render on his canvas. But it was a task to which the power even of genius proved wholly inadequate. The chair Van Gogh had seen was obviously the same in essence as the chair I had seen. But, though incomparably more real than the chairs of ordinary perception, the chair in his picture remained no more than an unusually expressive symbol of the fact. The fact had been manifested Suchness; this was only an emblem. Such emblems are sources of true knowledge about the Nature of Things, and this true knowledge may serve to prepare the mind which accepts it for immediate insights on its own account. But that is all. However expressive, symbols can never be the things they stand for.

It is when he begins to muse on another aspect of representational art that he truly begins to wax philosophical.

I returned the Van Gogh to its rack and picked up the volume standing next to it. It was a book on Botticelli. I turned the pages. "The Birth of Venus"-never one of my favorites. "Mars and Venus," that loveliness so passionately denounced by poor Ruskin at the height of his long-drawn sexual tragedy. The marvelously rich and intricate "Calumny of Apelles." And then a somewhat less familiar and not very good picture, "Judith." My attention was arrested and I gazed in fascination, not at the pale neurotic heroine or her attendant, not at the victim's hairy head or the vernal landscape in the background, but at the purplish silk of Judith's pleated bodice and long wind-blown skirts.

This was something I had seen before-seen that very morning, between the flowers and the furniture, when I looked down by chance, and went on passionately staring by choice, at my own crossed legs. Those folds in the trousers - what a labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity! And the texture of the gray flannel - how rich, how deeply, mysteriously sumptuous! And here they were again, in Botticelli's picture.

Civilized human beings wear clothes, therefore there can be no portraiture, no mythological or historical storytelling without representations of folded textiles. But though it may account for the origins, mere tailoring can never explain the luxuriant development of drapery as a major theme of all the plastic arts. Artists, it is obvious, have always loved drapery for its own sake - or, rather, for their own. When you paint or carve drapery, you are painting or carving forms which, for all practical purposes, are non-representational-the kind of unconditioned forms on which artists even in the most naturalistic tradition like to let themselves go. In the average Madonna or Apostle the strictly human, fully representational element accounts for about ten per cent of the whole. All the rest consists of many colored variations on the inexhaustible theme of crumpled wool or linen. And these non-representational nine-tenths of a Madonna or an Apostle may be just as important qualitatively as they are in quantity. Very often they set the tone of the whole work of art, they state the key in which the theme is being rendered, they express the mood, the temperament, the attitude to life of the artist. Stoical serenity reveals itself in the smooth surfaces, the broad untortured folds of Piero's draperies. Torn between fact and wish, between cynicism and idealism, Bernini tempers the all but caricatural verisimilitude of his faces with enormous sartorial abstractions, which are the embodiment, in stone or bronze, of the everlasting commonplaces of rhetoric - the heroism, the holiness, the sublimity to which mankind perpetually aspires, for the most part in vain. And here are El Greco's disquietingly visceral skirts and mantles; here are the sharp, twisting, flame-like folds in which Cosimo Tura clothes his figures: in the first, traditional spirituality breaks down into a nameless physiological yearning; in the second, there writhes an agonized sense of the world's essential strangeness and hostility. Or consider Watteau; his men and women play lutes, get ready for balls and harlequinades, embark, on velvet lawns and under noble trees, for the Cythera of every lover's dream; their enormous melancholy and the flayed, excruciating sensibility of their creator find expression, not in the actions recorded, not in the gestures and the faces portrayed, but in the relief and texture of their taffeta skirts, their satin capes and doublets. Not an inch of smooth surface here, not a moment of peace or confidence, only a silken wilderness of countless tiny pleats and wrinkles, with an incessant modulation - inner uncertainty rendered with the perfect assurance of a master hand - of tone into tone, of one indeterminate color into another. In life, man proposes, God disposes. In the plastic arts the proposing is done by the subject matter; that which disposes is ultimately the artist's temperament, proximately (at least in portraiture, history and genre) the carved or painted drapery. Between them, these two may decree that a fete galante shall move to tears, that a crucifixion shall be serene to the point of cheerfulness, that a stigmatization shall be almost intolerably sexy, that the likeness of a prodigy of female brainlessness (I am thinking now of Ingres' incomparable Mme. Moitessier) shall express the austerest, the most uncompromising intellectuality.

But this is not the whole story. Draperies, as I had now discovered, are much more than devices for the introduction of non-representational forms into naturalistic paintings and sculptures. What the rest of us see only under the influence of mescalin, the artist is congenitally equipped to see all the time. His perception is not limited to what is biologically or socially useful. A little of the knowledge belonging to Mind at Large oozes past the reducing valve of brain and ego, into his consciousness. It is a knowledge of the intrinsic significance of every existent. For the artist as for the mescalin taker draperies are living hieroglyphs that stand in some peculiarly expressive way for the unfathomable mystery of pure being. More even than the chair, though less perhaps than those wholly supernatural flowers, the folds of my gray flannel trousers were charged with "is-ness." To what they owed this privileged status, I cannot say. Is it, perhaps, because the forms of folded drapery are so strange and dramatic that they catch the eye and in this way force the miraculous fact of sheer existence upon the attention? Who knows? What is important is less the reason for the experience than the experience itself. Poring over Judith's skirts, there in the World's Biggest Drug Store, I knew that Botticelli - and not Botticelli alone, but many others too-had looked at draperies with the same transfigured and transfiguring eyes as had been mine that morning. They had seen the Istigkeit, the Allness and Infinity of folded cloth and had done their best to render it in paint or stone. Necessarily, of course, without success. For the glory and the wonder of pure existence belong to another order, beyond the Power of even the highest art to express. But in Judith's skirt I could clearly see what, if I had been a painter of genius, I might have made of my old gray flannels. Not much, heaven knows, in comparison with the reality, but enough to delight generation after generation of beholders, enough to make them understand at least a little of the true significance of what, in our pathetic imbecility, we call "mere things" and disregard in favor of television.

This is how one ought to see," I kept saying as I looked down at my trousers, or glanced at the jeweled books in the shelves, at the legs of my infinitely more than Van-Goghian chair. "This is how one ought to see, how things really are."

The remainder of Huxley's intellectualized mescaline-induced meanderings take on a similar style.

On the other end of the experiential spectrum are the incredibly intrepid (and sometimes foolhardy) psychonauts who relate their own experiences on websites like The Vaults of Erowid.

For instance, under the San Pedro vault, one of the trips described begins this way:

So it was 11:30 when I drank the first cup. I lay back in my car at an elementary school parking lot (it was a cloudy Sunday), and listened to a mixed CD I made specifically for my trip (I would listen to the same songs again and again later on).

It tasted bad, but not nearly as bad as everyone says it tastes, but that is probably because I diluted the cactus with a huge bottle of squirt it would have been nice to get Cactus Cooler, but they don't seem to really sell that anymore. I felt a little sick, but other than that, nothing really happened.

I left to use the restroom at Wendys, and found myself starting to get a little anxious at the sight of city people in their natural habitat. Going back to my spot, at around 11:50, I somehow managed to drink the rest both cactus juice and squirt. All in all, not that bad.

Then the sickness started. I laid back in the drivers seat, and began to feel very heavy, and nauseous but it was ok because I expected that. I was waiting for J to be free so he could be my sitter for the day, and I was getting very anxious waiting. My anxiety was increasing as time was moving slower and slower, and I was starting to feel heavier.

At about 1pm, I was feeling a little less nauseous, so I went for a drive around Js neighborhood (note: driving while on a psychedelic is a BAD idea -please do not do this - I won't again). Suddenly everything seemed absurd and comical, and I started to laugh nearly uncontrollably.

I drove past this fat little girl, and laughed at the way she waddled not out of spite or pity, but just because, I dunno, she was ridiculous. I also saw this old man sitting out in front of his driveway, wiping his nose with this big oily cloth like with such enthusiasm. I could only chuckle at the way his indifferent grandson or whatever fumbled with the dead machinery of their car.

The anxiety was increasing and I was feeling a little paranoid like there were too many people. I couldn't just sit somewhere and be left alone. Blue minivans and mustached men in trucks kept swarming around wherever I was, throwing insipid faces at me, grimacing, questioning or that is how it seemed.

After a very detailed description of everything he did during his experience, our narrator finishes in a more thoughtful tone.

Lessons: Most of the stuff I thought about I already kind of knew, but it was very different in its depth and power over me. Philosophical knowledge is sometimes useful in everyday life, but it was absolutely necessary in the psychedelic state. It wasn't whether I turned left or right that it was important, it was whether my subconscious wanted to live or die, to love or hate that was important at every moment. Being in that state also brought me to a whole new level of empathy for other people and animals that I have never really felt before it was really amazing, insightful, and awe-inspiring.

I didn't see God/the void, but I felt momentary union with it/her/him as I was able to let go of my stubborn ego, and become one with nothingness, with the paradox. It was amazing to feel how it is to be in between things, between you and the tv, between the music as objective notes and your perception of them, and then to become the music, to move from apprehension of chaos to union with it. There is simply nothing on this earth (that I have found) that compares to that.

With that said, however, I don't exactly want to go back there for a while. It was awesome, but at that same time it was constantly verging on horrific, because it takes so much energy to hold yourself together to keep from letting your ego be completely dissolved in the void. And it may not be that bad, but, considering I don't really know how I'd be on the other side of the event horizon, I'm not ready to try it. I felt completely exhausted and vulnerable the day after, as well as a little depressed just a little. But I do intend to do it again, and, most likely, with a more potent dose.

For Erowid trippers, one of the things that always struck me as being just a bit crazy is how oblivious many are as to what they are taking and how it will affect them. Most at least note the amounts of the drugs they take, yet many mix different psychoactive and psychedelic substances in the same trip.

One such person described himself as "an 'experienced' tripper. Not a voyager, or a pioneer, and definitely not a 'psychonaut', but definitely more than a novice." One weekend, he and a friend drove to a national forest and proceeded to take not only San Pedro, but also two other psychedelic plants: Syrian Rue and Mimosa tenuiflora!

This is not unusual for the contributors to Erowid's vaults. The impression I have after reading many of these experiences is that most of the contributors are simply looking for the most radical experience they can have and nothing more. Many speak of touching "the other" on their journeys, but it's apparent that this is not their motivation or intention going in.

Still, it can be said that many, if not most, Westerners began their psychedelic experiences with little more than curiosity or because their friends were doing it. Depending on what they experienced, a good number of these people, including perhaps the most famous, Richard Alpert, who later became Ram Das, were so overwhelmed by their psychedelic journeys that they spent the rest of their lives pursuing the lessons and heavens they experienced on their mind excursions.

In our government's eternally-discombobulated policies on drugs, San Pedro Cactus is perfectly legal to own as a plant, but if you grind up a foot or so and were to ingest it, you are potentially committing a felony. I say potentially, because as of this writing, there have apparently been no convictions involving San Pedro. Peyote, on the other hand, is prohibited by name in the Controlled Substances Act and there have been arrests and prosecutions for the use of this substance.

In 1990, a very interesting U.S. Supreme Court ruling regarding the firing of a Native American man for using Peyote, led to Congress passing an amendment to the American Indian Religious Freedom Act stating that it is "legal for peyote to be used for ceremonial purposes in connection with the practice of traditional American Indian religion...the Native American Church."

The Healing Ceremony

The ceremony I attended brought together ten people to spend the evening and early morning hours participating in an ancient shamanic ritual. The shaman who presided over this experience has had years of experience working with Amazonian plant medicines and the ceremony was both otherworldly and quite beautiful.

The setting for our ceremony was on an old farmstead in a lovely rural area. At about 5 in afternoon, inside the barn that had been converted for a variety of purposes by different groups, we all gathered in a circle where the shaman began the ceremony with prayers and some sacred indigeneous songs in preparation for the work we were to do that evening.

Following this opening invocation, he and some other went into another room to prepare the Wachuma. In a few minutes, they came back with 11 big cups of the substance. One whiff, however, and we knew that it was going to be a difficult chore to down the entire 12 ounces of the foul smelling cactus juice.

Okay, I'm going to describe the Wachuma as I've described it to everyone I've talked to about this experience since then. To me, the drink had the look, the texture, the smell and, alas, the taste of nothing so much as vomit. Its only saving grace was that it was mixed with pineapple juice, but even that didn't help much. We were instructed to drink it as quickly as possible so as not to prolong our gustatory torment.

I gave it one last look and breathing only through my mouth chugged the stuff, then quickly sucked on a lemon that had been provided for the purpose. It would take some of the others - most of whom had never done this before - a good half hour to get it all down. But finally, we'd all consumed our portions. We were also told that most, if not all of us would probably purge ourselves of the Wachuma before the evening was done, but that we should try not to do that for at least an hour and a half.

We were told that it might take from 45 to 90 minutes for the plant's effects to be felt. After about a half hour, we began our "walkabout" through the farm files surrounding us.

It was a clear but muggy evening when we left the barn. Dusk was quickly descending over the land and I could feel an unmistakeable altered state beginning to settle in. The first thing I noticed was that in the diminished light, while most colors were being overtaken by the impending darkness, a few colors stood out. Certain hues of greens, yellows and orange, especially, took on an almost inner glow and suddenly I realized why day-glo colors were so popular during and after the psychedelic era of the '60s.

Dusk can take on a mysterious presence at any time, but under the influence of the Wachuma, it seemed even more mysterious. As we walked around the field on a path at the edge of a wooded area, I noticed this very alien-looking plant.


The red-purple vines were stunningly bright and the green buds stood out like individual sentinels to the mystery inside them. I don't recall ever seeing this plant before. Yet there were many, many of these plants along the edges of that field. What the buds looked like to me more than anything else was little peyote buds. Perhaps it was the spirit of the Wachuma seeming to recognize a relative.

I learned later that this particular plant is called Pokeweed and while the plant is toxic, the leaves can be prepared by boiling them three times to reduce the toxin. The result is a staple of the Southern U.S. and is called Poke Salad or Poke Salit. Remember the '60's Tony Joe White song, Poke Salad Annie?

Okay, probably not.

Anyway, then came the moment I wasn’t looking forward to. One of the men opened the gate that led to a swampy pond along a set of railroad tracks and we all ambled through it.

"Well", I thought "here they come. The bane of my life on summer evenings: mosquitoes."

How right I was. There were swarms of them near that pond. I heard them all around me and swatted them away as best I could. Yet the others didn’t seem to be bothered at all by these tiny pests as they were well into their own very personal journeys.

Oh yeah, the headache!

I'd had one of the worst headaches in a long time before the ceremony, probably because I'd fasted for the day and probably didn't drink enough water. Besides that, I was in the middle of a three-week body cleanse and was eating only fresh, organic raw fruits and vegetables.

My headache was so bad, in fact, that I seriously considered not going through with the ceremony and I refused to take any artificial painkillers. But after doing some holotropic breathing, I felt the headache release its grip enough to convince me that I shouldn't pass up this unique experience.

Now, however, perhaps because of the work of the plant's medicinal qualities , it suddenly occurred to me that the headache was completely gone. Besides, by now I was much more preoccupied with the mosquitoes that were assaulting me from every direction.

It was dark now and prime mosquito witching hour. Still, no one else seemed to be bothered by them like I was. Almost everyone else either stood quietly or sat down in the grass and just went into themselves, but I continued to walk around.

During this time, an fascinating moment occurred. Across the pond, a deer saunted into view then stopped and looked across at what must have been a very odd sight: a small tableau of people standing or sitting very still and in complete silence. Every one of us had noticed the deer and there was a quite palpable exchange of consciousness between our two species for a few moments until the deer simply looked away and continued its solo journey.

It was probably an hour and a half into the experience and I still wasn’t feeling anything that I would call psychedelic, and when the shaman came up to me and asked if I was feeling the medicine, I had to tell him that I wasn't. What I meant was that I wasn't feeling the psychedelic effects Huxley had written about.

He didn’t respond, but simply walked away. He had mentioned earlier that sometime if people didn’t’ seem to “get off” with the amounts given, he’d give more, but we were well away from the barn and besides, I wasn't feeling that well by now and thought that if he did offer me more I’d probably refuse it.

We’d been told earlier that the cactus was an energizing substance and was used by Andean natives in a way similar to coca, which gave them great stamina to trek through the incredible sacred mountains of Western South America.

I, however, had only felt increasingly tired since our walk began. Finally, I just sat down in the grass and continued to swat away the mosquitoes. I was glad that I’d changed into long pants and shoes and socks instead of the shorts and sandals I’d worn to the ceremony. Now it was my scalp that most concerned me. I had brought mosquito repellant with me, so I sprayed my hands and arms, but don’t like to get the spray near my face. I did spray a bit on the top of my head, since mosquitoes seem to be especially attracted to my naked bald dome.

I must have fallen asleep for a few minutes while sitting there in the grass, because suddenly someone tapped me on the shoulder and said that we were leaving the pond area. When I looked around, I was the last one sitting and quickly got up and to rejoin the nomadic band.

Now, however, the physical effects of the cactus were beginning and my stomach was feeling queasy. I knew what was coming, so I hung back a little on the trail and then…spewed, tossed my cookies, upchucked, heaved and all the other euphemisms for that most unpleasant experience.

Yet, like so often happens after purging, I felt much better and quickly walked back to the group which was heading for the fire pit where we would continue the actual healing ceremony.

By the time we arrived at the fire pit, it was totally dark and we quickly gathered up any wood that we could find to start a fire. That done, we all sat down and the shaman began by saying prayers to the spirits of the East, West, North and South as well as Pachamama, Mother Earth and Pachatata, Father Sky. He also sang icaros: sacred songs (click for an example).

Now that we were away from the mosquitoes for the most part, I observed how I was feeling more closely. The first thing I noticed were the thousands of shooting rockets of embers that came off of the fire as it popped and sputtered with the old and new, wet and dry wood that we’d thrown into it. The tiny fiery trails they left as they rose in the air was something I’d seen before, but not quite as spectacularly as this.

Almost from the moment we left the barn, there was almost no talking between any of us. This continued at the fire. The shaman was the only one who spoke, but only occasioinally. Then we were all back in our own interior worlds. I knew that I was feeling the effects of the medicine because of the feeling of serenity that had fully come over me. Yet my thinking was as clear as ever—perhaps more so.

Over the next few hours, whenever the fire would nearly die out, the man I called The Fire Keeper would walk over to it and add more wood. His image at those times was quite interesting to behold. He wore a baseball cap backwards and had some Peruvian beads around his neck. He made a primitive, yet reassuring presence as he dutifully performed his task throughout the night.

I was fairly tired by this time, but didn’t want to leave. The weather had cooled considerably since the heat of the day and toward the end of the ceremony, I wished that I’d brought a jacket…and again was grateful that I’d worn long pants, sock and shoes. But before that point, the weather had been almost perfect.

One thing that occurred frequently during the night was this. Suddenly down the hill at the bottom of the valley, we’d hear the sound of train gates sounding their alarm. Then we’d hear the approaching train’s blaring horn. And because of how we were sitting there above the tracks, the trains sounded like they were just a few feet away as they roared by us. Most were very long freight or coal trains. Yet they didn’t seem to disturb anyone particularly. In fact, some mentioned later that they had viewed them as a symbol of their own lives rushing by.

The thing that was most disturbing during the night was the occasional explosion of fireworks someone apparently had left over from a 4th of July celebration. Some of these included large bomb types that made an incredibly loud booming report. Fortunately, these were fairly infrequent and didn’t dampen our spirits...or scare away the Spirits.

I knew by now that I would not have the kind of full-blown psychedelic experience I had wanted, so I settled back to simply enjoy the feelings engendered within us by the ceremony and the warm and inviting fire in the midst of a beautiful natural setting.

About this time, I noticed that the shaman had gone up to one of the women and was speaking with her. He then performed some rituals using tobacco and fragrant oils. He also sang some sacred songs. This was all done quietly so that the others’ reverie was not disturbed. Yet we were all quite curious about the different elements of the ceremony and most of us would glance over occasionally to see what he was doing.

There were five men and five women in our circle and I thought as he went to the third woman in a row that this was just a bit strange…such was my own mind’s musings at the time.

“What’s this guy up to?”, I recall myself thinking.

I guess that I’d read too much about how some “religious” and cult leaders used their positions of power to exploit the women in their charge. Was this what was happening here?

As it turned out, however, the shaman’s intentions were perfectly honorable. For when he finished with the women, he began going around the circle and performing his healing rituals with the men as well.

What interested me was that each person received a personalized healing ritual. When he got to me, I told him about my own issues about being open to Spirit because of my background: my lifelong commitment to scientific rationalism and a long-held skepticism and cynicism of all things non-ordinary.

He understood my problem and said that one way to open up to Spirit was to sing. So as he sang a song in Spanish, I quietly followed him as well as I could. Fortunately, the tune was simple and the words were ones I knew from my very limited Spanish vocabulary.

In these songs, he invoked the spirits of the sky, the sun, the moon, the earth to come into my soul. He then used tobacco as is done in many South American indigenous cultures and placed a few drops of a fragrant oil in my palms for me to inhale deeply. I didn’t quite hear the name of this oil, but as I searched for this substance on Google, I thought that he'd called it agua de Florida. In any case, it was a very sweet and wonderfully fragrant mixture of flowers and I inhaled as deeply as I could.

As he went on to the rest of the men, I thought more about what exactly I was experiencing. There was certainly a peace and calm and I caught myself smiling at different things that happened and as I glanced around at the others. If I was “high”, it was relatively mild, yet there was something very interesting and unusual happening here.

Then I recalled the first time I ever got “stoned” on marijuana many decades ago and I realized that this was a very similar feeling. There was a surreal quality about the evening and one thing that was quite pronounced was the intensity and diversity of sounds. Above us were thousands of tree frogs chattering in the canopy. The crackling of the fire along with the occasional train sounds bearing down on us all contributed to a very aural experience; much stronger than the previous visual effects.

The main difference between this “high” and my old pot highs was the fact that with pot, one’s thoughts flit around endlessly; lighting on this idea or that sensation and all-too-soon it passes on to the next thought or external sensory event. In addition, with this substance there was never any sense of the paranoia that one often experiences with marijuana.

In fact, for whatever personal reasons it happened, the last time I smoked a joint some twenty years ago, I had a panic attack, which frightened me enough that I didn’t risk it again. Actually, I have to confess that I did try a one-hitter a few years ago and I very much enjoyed the old feelings. It was much like meeting an old friend. Yet, since I left my youth, I’ve seldom felt the need to use pot, and except for that one incident, have only the fondest memories of that remarkable plant substance.

A couple of times during the night while we were around the fire, the shaman brought out his drum and began beating it at the appropriate rate; a rate used for thousands of years in almost every indigenous culture to drive the minds of its listeners to a brain-wave state that resembles deep meditation.

Brain Waves

Over the past few decades research into auditory driving has found that there is significant reason to believe that what the shamans knew about the use of drumming to induce trance states can be done in a number of different ways. An entire industry has grown up around the very interesting concept of binaural beats to do the same thing.

Using two different tones just slightly out of phase with each other, an impression is created in the brain that a beating has been created, even though there is no actual beat in the tones themselves. But these “beats” can then be manipulated to bring the brain's waves from our normal awakened Beta states which is generally at a rate of about 20-40 cycles per second down to 4-7 cycles per second which is the state of deep dreaming sleep or deep meditation.

I have used this type of technology to emulate deep meditation since I have always found it difficult to create the deep focus required to create that inner state so desired in deep meditation. Is this cheating? There is great debate over this question. My thought about this is similar to the whole question of using psychedelics to achieve mystical states. If this technology (or natural method in the case of psychedelic plants) is there, why not use it?

There is the whole issue of the hectic and busy nature of life in the modern world; with stimuli from many different sources constantly bombarding us. We are no longer living in the forests and plains as primitive peoples did. And most of us don’t have the opportunity or inclination to spend our lives in a monastery where the pace of life is designed to be slow and contemplative.

For better or worse, this is the world we find ourselves in today, and if some can discipline their minds to create these states using their own will and attention, more power to them. Others of us find this difficult, and I don’t feel any compunction not to use technology. In our hemisphere, especially, indigenous cultures have used and still use both drumming and medicinal or psychedelic plants to achieve their most transformational states.

Meanwhile...

...after about five hours the shaman told us that it was time to move indoors to close the evening’s ceremony. So we walked slowly and quietly back through the woods and returned to the converted barn we’d be staying in for the night.

Once we were back inside, the shaman said a few more prayers to thank the spirits for making our experiences meaningful and for bringing to each of us what was needed in our own healing.

After that, we all began to drift off to sleep. Unfortunately, I hadn’t brought the best sleeping equipment. I had a nice sleeping bag, but most people, more experienced to the world of camping, had brought with them inflatable Therm-a-Rest mattresses which provided an air-cushioned few inches of padding between them and the bare barnwood floor.

For me, it was a less than satisfying night of sleeping as I missed my well-padded mattress. Still, I got through the night reasonably rested and in the morning, we all had a potluck breakfast with things we’d all contributed.

Before breakfast, however, there was one more piece of business to complete. This was the psychological integration of our previous evening. This involved each of us sharing his or her experience - at least as much as we cared to discuss.

This process was almost identical to the evening assembly of our small group following our Holotropic Breathwork session in Houston. We did much the same thing insofar as we all shared our experiences with each other and since the group was nearly the same size then as now, it was intimate enough that you didn’t feel like you were sharing your very personal experience with the whole world.

My impression after listening to the others that morning was that perhaps only one or two had what could be considered transformative psychedelic experiences. Most, I think, felt like I had to a more or lesser degree. The visuals and the aural effects were pronounced for most, if not all, of us. But what we were processing mentally and emotionally about our own lives was the greater and more important things to each of us. Perhaps this was because, like me, most were new to Wachuma, although I never found out if they were also new to psychedelics as I had been.

During a good conversation I had with the shaman after we got back inside, I told him that perhaps it was because I was expecting “magic” that I’d initially been disappointed. But then I told him that if I looked at the substance in the spirit of which it was given, as a medicine, I couldn’t really expect that anything substantive would take place immediately. Instead, like most medicines, it could take some time to achieve its purpose and my hope was that it would have a long-term positive effect on me.

Maybe I didn't feel any great sense of magic during my experience with Wachuma, but my next experience with psychedelics would definitely involve magic: magic mushrooms!

Stay tuned for Part 2.

[Update: I've often written here about the history of psychedelic use in the modern age. I just read an article in Reality Sandwich that gives an excellent overview of this subject. Before Tim Leary spent a good portion of his outrageous life giving psychedelics a bad name, there were Albert Hofmann, Stanislav Grof, Gary Fischer, Myron Stolaroff, James Fadiman and a host of others who pioneered the use of psychedelics in psychotherapy. (For more information, I highly recommend reading Higher Wisdom: Eminent Elders Explore the Continuing Impact of Psychedelics.) For nearly 40 years now, while mental illness has increased dramatically in our increasingly dysfunctional society, worldwide research in this field has disappeared and almost been forgotten - until very recently. David Jay Brown's article highlights the promises, benefits and potential the future holds in this very important area of research. ]