Kaleb Smith - Spiritual Autobiography, Part 2
The Amazon Jungle
I flew into Lima, Peru and checked into a beautiful antique Spanish colonial building downtown, a mansion which had been converted into a hotel. I was given a cheap cubby room under the staircase - less than ideal, but I was just happy to crash heavily with my bags and relax after my long trip South.
That night, I had a powerful BIG dream. In it, I was approached by a male spirit who let me know that he had been orchestrating my life, and the coincidences which led me to Peru. He was a leader, and phenomenally powerful and spoke in images, scenes which he would present me within. He expressed that, while it may seem on the surface that I will be talking up on stage at this upcoming conference on shamanism, to be clear, it is actually HE who will be doing the talking. This was expressed by revealing the layers of the presentation, as it occurred; a sort of cross-cut of the reality of his influence over me. “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”
While he would allow me to appear to be performing, his massive presence was behind me the whole time, guiding and informing the real message up through me, to be expressed to the audience. It was a deeply powerful presence, as if being near the president or some other influential leader, and I awoke in awe of this figure and the breadth of his power, having seen his ability to control and orchestration circumstance in time from his side, to serve his ends. I was such a small and minor individual, in comparison, yet the attention would be on me at this important event; a sort of front which I would represent.
I awoke with my heart racing, buzzing across my body, and quickly wrote down as much of the experience as I could at a fevered pace, the excitement and awe of it all still fresh in my mind. This was big! Much bigger than me. The inexplicable synchronicities that had fallen so stepwise into place, and led me to the conference, suddenly made more sense after this interaction with this powerful “no nonsense” entity, and the message he conveyed.
Within a few days, I was arranging my travel to Iquitos. It is a unique city, as there are no roads in or out - it is nestled so deep in the Upper Amazon Basin that it can only be reached by small airplane or extended boat trips up the Amazon river. I had setup living arrangements and a flight into their little airfield, there, and was set to meet the head of the conference the following day.
Culture shock struck as I exited the plane into that sweltering unrelenting wet jungle heat. My Scandinavian blood is very thick for that kind of equatorial climate! I was sunburnt within the hour. I noticed the desperation and poverty rampant in that city, cut off from the commerce and culture of the capital. Very few cars, but for a few soles, I could get a ride on a motorcycle driven cart, a homemade woven seat with a metal roof to block the blaring sun. Soon, I was at the residence of Alan Shoemaker, the man who organized the shamanism conference I’d be presenting at in a few days.
Now, I’d been working in Stanford’s Psychophysiology lab for months, in Palo Alto, studying the EEG signature of emotional regulation. Yet, all the while I’d been there, I’d been trying to integrate into Stanford’s culture - specifically the subculture of creative writing and psychedelics, which I knew existed in within the walls of that institution somewhere. I wanted to meet the hippie Stanfordites, reciting poetry and having existential adventures together. But actually finding these students or professors, who I knew existed somewhere in there, was proving much harder than I’d anticipated. I’d sit on a bench and strike up a conversation with someone who seemed receptive to that sort of creative lifestyle, yet came up short again and again. It was frustrating and I had been just close to giving up on the hope of finding “my people” at Stanford.
Within an hour of arriving to this interesting walled compound of Alan Shoemaker’s, I was introduced to one of the other presenters who had arrived: a tallish Native American looking girl named Lyla. She offered me a bottle of beer and I thanked her, taking out the bottle opener on my keychain to open it. This opener was a simple black piece of plastic with the worn logo, “Fatty Zone,” on it; a local head shop near my house where I’d gotten it for free. Seeing this, she said “Wait…you know Fatty Zone?”
“Yea! Its 3 blocks from my house…”
“Fatty Zone is 3 blocks from my house…!” she said, checking the address on the keychain.
Sure enough, it turns out that Lyla was a student at Stanford. And, sure enough, she proceeded to explain that she was the president of Stanford’s creative writing society…and that she was Stanford’s main source for psychoactive substances, which she considered it her mission to share and distribute. She was the person I’d been trying to meet for months, but I had to go to the other side of the world to find her!
Certain relationships feel as though they were “meant” to happen, and ours was one such relationship. Over time, she would introduce me to countless powerfully meaningful things, everything I needed to find on Stanford’s campus and a network of people who would prove to change my life irreversibly. Becoming active in Stanford’s poetry circle, and reading on stage in their competitions (one of which I won) was a pivotal moment for me and the development of my voice as a writer.
That first night in Iquitos, I was bombarded by a second overwhelmingly powerful visionary dream, in which I interacted with some individual or spirit. It began by my introduction to a short native man with black hair to his shoulders and a paunch and a very distinct face. He held a bottle of ayahuasca in one hand, in the other hand he held out a large seed. He explained that the ayahuasca, by itself, does not teach. Pouring the brew over the seed, he said the ayahuasca only allows the teacher plant to open and be heard. With this, the seed sprouted into a beautiful flowered vine and, with its blossoming, there was a message it conveyed, one I could not otherwise have heard.
This stocky native man then led me down through a hole into the Earth, down beneath the trees of the forest, a tunnel through the soil, into the root systems of the trees. There he explained that, in order to hear the plants, you must get beneath, down into the roots, in the subconscious of the plants - that that is where they talk to one another, in those spreading systems of intertwined roots. That is where you can hear them. Sure enough, I could hear many quiet conversations of the forest, there, the many voices and personalities of the plants I’d only seen and known the “surface half” of. This is where their they express themselves, in the medium of the Earth.
I awoke from this dream, again, half hyperventilating. There was so much information being conveyed to me, I tried as best I could to write it all down, but it was overwhelming. I know many of the details were lost in translation, to writing, but the main “take home” of this big dream was recorded. Later, I learned that this idea of a “teacher plant,” separate from the ayahuasca, is actually an established facet of shamanic work in the Amazon - that shamans even categorize different types of teaching or healing into different strains and species of plants, which they can call on as needed. A botanical toolbox of healing knowledge, which the shaman utilizes in a systematic way, based on the needs of his patients and his chosen specialty. The fact that all of this fairly-specific belief system came to me, first, in a visionary dream seemed a powerful testament to the legitimacy of that “interaction” I experienced. That was no dream!
The next day was the first official day of the conference, a casual meet and greet ramping up to the actual presentations. The courtyard, near the pool, was filled with people - about 45 different presenters and people selling trinkets and so on. Sitting by the pool, I was approached by an elderly bald man named Freddy, who was quite an interesting decidedly-shifty sort of character who tried, and succeeded, to sell me a tarot card reading using regular playing cards. In this reading, he claims to have been able to tell that I was dealing with an illness - a safe bet, perhaps cold reading. I proceeded to tell him briefly about the illness and the possession experience that had immediately preceded it.
Freddy nodded, listening to my story, seemingly concerned. When I finished, he said “Yes! It is a spirit illness. For what you need, you need to talk to Javier de Silva.”
He pointed across the yard of 45 people to a man standing near the far doorway. He was a short native man, with black hair down to his shoulders, and a paunch. It was the him! The man from the night previous, exactly him, down to the distinctive mole on his face. This shaman, Javier, looked at me from across the room with a mischievous knowing smile, nodding in acknowledgement of me and, apparently, laughing at my astonishment. He recognized me as well!
The Shipibo Ceremonies
Despite the strong synchronicities and dream interactions with Javier de Silva, I ended up avoiding him. Many had said he was a “Brujo” who was once a very powerful and good-hearted healer, but had lost his way and fallen from the path. Other foreigners told me he had threatened them and tried to manipulate them, saying they would be bitten by snakes or have family members die if they did not give him money. All of these rumors frightened me, as he seemed like a dark or mischievous figure, so I sought out more traditional and isolated shamans, further away from the touristy Iquitos.
I was able to find someone to guide me to a remote area deep in the jungle, up river, where some native Shipibo tribespeople lived. Getting to them involved riding a homemade boat up river for 3 hours, and then, from there, hiking into the jungle for 2 and a half hours. There I met with them and lived for about 3 months.
The shamans were women; radiant, smiling grandmother figures who sang such beautiful breathy icaros, harmonizing in high-pitched steps during ceremony. We drank almost every night, in intensive sessions, trying to clean out the body for further work. Understanding what these shamans said after the session was very difficult, as no one who spoke Shipibo knew any English.
The lead shaman would speak about what she saw during her ceremony with me, seemingly explaining with great detail the specifics of her journey and the diagnosis, talking for many minutes. Yet, this message first had to be fully translated from Shipibo to Spanish after she was done speaking, and then a second translator would have to break down the gist of the message and translate it from Spanish to English. By the time it finally got across to me, all that was left of those many minutes of explanation would be “She says the medicine is good for you.” She said more than that!!
One thing that did come across was that the ayahuasca would, first, clean the body out and that this process would take about a week, when coupled with the dieta. As I understood it, the body in this case could be compared to a window. When I arrived, it was very crudy, I imagined it like the window above a greasy burger grill, caked with many years of thick smoke, so that it could hardly be seen through. Ayahuasca’s deep intensive purges felt like a scouring of this greasy window, it often felt like I was expelling some black oily sickness from down deep. Yet, this purging also had a psychological aspect, as with every heaving release, I would see painful memories or dark traumas being brought up and out from where they had been, in those thick sedimentary layers down below.
It was only after this window has been scoured clean that light can shine through it again. This radiant light is something visible in the clean bright eyes of the old Shipibo women, their open arms and their open sensitive hearts. Its only when that window is completely clean that you can begin to see through it, to see the visions of the other side, those subtle energetic phenomena which are obscured by the residue of unclean living.
At a point around a week in, I can recall standing outside the maloka near this lagoon, with my hand against a strange Amazonian tree, just leaning in as I scream heaved at 1 in the morning. I was truly working hard, bringing up something from deep in my core, something that had needed to be expelled for many years. And, finally…it was out! That first breath afterwards, that long inhale, was simply the fullest cleanest breath I can recall having in my life; as if some weight had finally been lifted from my chest, and, all at once, I could breath freely again, open and unrestrained. That was when I knew I was clean.
The visions began in full force after that. There were many spiritual phenomena that occurred in those months which were powerful and unexplainable, suggesting there are untapped potentials available in the higher ranges of human sensitivity. I will described a handful of the most meaningful.
Meditation
Meditation on ayahuasca changed some aspect of the room, as if my presence came to expand to fill the space and influence those within it in distinct ways; no doubt reliant, too, on their hypersensitive state of attention. I sat Indian-style about 10 feet from the shamans, allowing my breath to be as full and slow as my capacity allowed. These long exhales became longer and calmer, until I reached nearly a breathless state, my chest throbbing and vibrant with the same nervous energy I had experienced previously, during the EKG incidents, yet calmed and flowing.
Silently breathing in this way, somehow the shamans began to respond to these meditative breaths. At the peak of a silent inhale, and then the slow calm release, two of the shamans would “sighhhh” right alongside my exhale, which was silent and not audible to them. Somehow, their breathing rhythms had fallen into perfect sync with my own, and the full almost overwhelming charge in my rib cage, being released, was influencing their subjective state as well; a kind of entrainment. Although, of course, I could not make any real assumptions about the nature of their subjective state in that moment, the long trancey sigh that we shared could be felt as a deeply fulfilling and almost orgasmic-sounding state of ecstasy. They were riding my deep meditative breaths with me, as if I was doing the “work” and they were enjoying the long pregnant cycles of charged breath, which they were able to perceive in some subtle energetic way in the room. Their singing of the icaros was distinctly different after this meditative connection we shared, especially beautiful and transcendent. I became, in that moment of shared ecstatic exhalation, aware of the profound power of breath.
In other instances, my breathing would seem to induce powerful energetic phenomena in my nervous system, similar to the convulsive states I’d experienced years previous, tied to my quivering chest. This ayahuasca meditation, lying on the floor, would come as great quaking pulses, up through my core, causing my whole body to move dramatically at a rhythm distinct from my heartbeat. Chairs and beds would creak and pulse, moving under me during these mysterious and overwhelming energetic states.
Disease Extraction
Early in the 3 months of sessions, I let the shamans know that I had an illness. Yet, I was careful not to tell them anything about the nature of the illness, or its location in the body. I admit, I was skeptical, and wanted to test this supposed ability to see and extract disease during these ceremonies. I said nothing more, other than that I was sick, so there would be no bias or hints for her to “cold read.”
The shaman drank aya with me and looked at my body, scanning me, and placing her open hands over me. She said she saw the illness in my gut - which was correct. She then began an extraction, using tobacco juice, which she spit onto my stomach as she sucked the sickness out, and dramatically spit it into a bucket with gusto, almost as if vomiting. Then again, she would go in and pull the energetic signature of my illness out, and expel it into the bucket. Finally, this bucket was brought way out into the forest and its contents disposed of in a certain way.
What is interesting is, 2 days later, after my presentation at the shamanism conference, I had a ceremony with an Ecuadorian shaman. I, again, was careful not to tell him anything about my illness or its location in the body, only to say that I was sick and needed healing. He drank a strong brew and scanned my body as I laid on the floor of the hut. He finally said he could see the illness in my lower gut - which was correct. He then said that he could see that someone had recently tried to extract it, but that they didn’t get it all out! I was in awe. He could perceive the extraction that had taken place 2 days before, somehow! He had not known of my visiting that distant Shipibo shaman, and had not spoken with them. My skepticism of the legitimacy of the extraction procedure dissolved away…
The Finns
In terms of my limited previous knowledge of the plant medicine ayahuasca, I can say I was aware of the native belief system surrounding it, specifically that it was the “vine of souls” and would facilitate communication with spirits and ancestors. I had heard that, in the Amazon, the ayahuasca experience was referred to as the “little death” -- just a tiny death! Real quick, dying, talking to grandma and grampa, and then coming back. Suffice it to say, I was skeptical going into the jungle of this native belief system, or that the nature of one’s ethnicity or ancestry played any major role in the circumstances of one’s daily life, outside the obvious role of genetic predispositions, carried down the lines of lineage. Yet, again, in this case, when I left Peru, I was no longer skeptical…
I laid in the dark of the maloka, meditating on the gentle icaros, the old spiritual songs being sang to guide my inward journey. With my eyes closed there was a gradual but unambiguous sensation of ascent, felt in my chest, much like the tunnel experience with the lion entity in Michigan. This ascent continued for some time, until I reached a higher place which was separated by the edges of a tunnel I was stepping out of. This higher place was forested, coniferous, and I was high in the treetops. There were two entities of blue-white light who saw and greeted me, and seemed very aware of my coming here.
The female spoke “We are the Finns… we are the Finns…”
She continually emphasized this fact, as if she was not sure her message was coming across to me, it was repeated several times.
Finally, “We are the Finns. We are here to teach you…to see and hear more.”
This bright and benevolent being then explained “We live in the higher frequencies, where sound becomes light.”
When she said that, somehow, it made perfect sense - at least while I was there, in that place and that state-of-consciousness. It seems certain statements only make sense within the state-of-consciousness which produced them.
I was shown the facilities in this Finnish realm, and the many students who were there, learning to “see and hear more.”
Returning down to my body, and reimmersing myself into physicality, I was quite amazed, but at the same time thinking “Wow! Whatever THAT just was…” as if to disregard the incredible encounter as something unreal, just by its sheer exceptionality.
Yet, just a few hours later, I was having breakfast on the sidewalk at the Yellow Rose of Texas, a popular restaurant in downtown Iquitos. Enjoying my food there, with a table to myself, I heard “Suomalainen tyttö, hän tulee olemaan hienoa...”
I looked up and, directly to my right sat two tall blondes. I had to ask them “Excuse me, are you Finnish?”
“Yah! We are Finnish. How did you know?”
“I’m Finnish. I’d recognize Finnish a mile away…”
The odds of this occurrence! Of them sitting directly next to me, given all of the places they could sit, and times they could have sat there. I had to ask them,
“What are two Finns doing in the middle of the Amazon rainforest on a Thursday morning?”
They explained that their daughter was going to school in Peru, and so on. I explained to them that my grandma’s grandma was a shaman, or noaide, in Finland and that I’d always wanted to know more about what she did, and how she healed people - that all of that heritage was lost with the immigration to America.
Immediately, they responded “Oh, yes! You must speak with Anna-Leena. She is the head of the Finnish spirituality department at the University of Helsinki. Here is her number, and here is her email address.”
They had all of that information immediately on hand, knew her number by heart, and wrote this Finnish shamanism expert’s contact down for me. So, in the vision the night before, the Finns told me they would teach me. It wasn’t until a few hours later that I got directions to the school.
I was absolutely overwhelmed by the implications of this meeting. The sheer astronomical improbability of those two Finns choosing to sit next to me, at that exact moment AND happening to be very close friends with a foremost world-renowned expert on Finnish shamanism, Dr. Anna-Leena Siikala. I was simply awestruck.
I realized that this medicine, ayahuasca, was powerful in ways that I did not understand, in the manner that it orchestrated and arranged these meaningful and even life-altering coincidences with such perfect synchrony. The ancestry seemed central to this synchrony, somehow - not my Swedish side, but this Finnish side of my DNA seemed to be resonating very strongly in response to this medicine.
Yet, I’ve learned that these phenomenally meaningful coincidences can be arranged for one’s benefit, seemingly by ancestral spirits presenting important opportunities, like gifts containing new life directions, having an opportunity does not, necessarily, mean I accept those opportunities. That is to say, they won’t do the work for you! They’ll reveal a path, but it is still my choice to walk it. I never called Anna-Leena Siikala and, eventually, lost the slip of paper with her number. I feel guilt when I think of what that connection to the University of Helsinki could have opened in my life and my progress in understanding some of these experiences I’ve had.
Current Condition
The unusual illness with followed that first possession experience, shared with my girlfriend in Michigan, has continued to progress and worsen with time, despite the increased dosages of cortical steroids and chemotherapy drugs, intended to keep the inflammation at bay. I am overwhelmed with weakness and whole body pain, often unable to walk or climb stairs. I feel as though a heavy weight has been shackled to me, preventing me from doing all of the things I love and need to do, or expressing myself in the free and joyous way I once did, before the possession.
Yet, as strange as it sounds, I have come to see the illness as a strict and unrelenting guide, to keep me on the path of clarity. The only way I have found to be healthy is by fasting, or near fasting, keeping a clean and active lifestyle in place, free of alcohol, oils, sugar, meat, and caffeine - all things which I love and would definitely indulge in were it not for the immediate and stern “punishment” I receive from my body as a result. With these limitations in place, the only way to survive and live without pain seems to be in adopting a lifestyle of dietary restraint and solitude, one which I cannot help but notice parallels the lifestyle of the shamanic initiate in many cultures.
Harner writes about this illness resulting from a spiritual interaction, calling it the “initiatory illness,” in which the afflicted individual must confront his sickness by following a calling to shamanic work, one laid out by powerful coincidences and dreams. The closer you are to the path, the more these meaningful coincidences will occur - that that is a sign you are close and have the attention of the spirit guides on you. On the other hand, if this initiate chooses to ignore this call to healing work, and step away from the path laid out before him, the illness will progress until it overtakes him, until he essentially goes crazy and dies.
I don’t want to go crazy and die! Yet, the degradative changes that continue to occur as I try to live a “normal” life, and ignore those spiritual experiences that have defined a decade of my development, are getting harder and harder to manage. Our culture has no place for these phenomena, and there is no track for young men who show signs of hypersensitivity like that early on to follow, towards a purposeful role in society. Transpersonal psychology seems the closest thing to shamanism Western culture has to offer, yet I was expelled from the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology for sharing my possession experience with my class, being denied access to higher education based on my spiritual beliefs because, so they told me, it “made some of the other students feel uncomfortable.”
I have written an abstract, describing that perception of the ranges of consciousness as discrete bandwidths which one may traverse; descending down through the spectra of distinct frequency ranges as one falls asleep, for instance, from Beta, thru Alpha, into Theta towards Delta, these measurable frequencies represent:
Consciousness research has reached a standstill, according to eminent theoretician, Bernard Baars, during a recent Stanford University symposium. While I am in agreement with Baars that there have been few major advances in the field for some time, part of the problem seems to be that we’ve exhausted the utility of our current metaphors. For this reason, I’d like to propose a new metaphor: a model which conceptualizes consciousness as a spectrum of frequencies whose natural division into discrete bandwidths defines the boundaries of state-specific content and perception. By defining consciousness in terms of radiant spectra, many of the known laws governing the electromagnetic spectrum can be applied to comprehend the subtle mechanics of subjectivity, objectivity, states of consciousness, dimensionality, and sensate awareness. In thinking of consciousness as information traversing a medium, we are granted a new set of analogies with which we can apply the well-defined principles of telecommunication to understand facets of awareness previously outside the limits of our purview. By modeling consciousness in this way, and utilizing the known processes governing modulatory phenomenon, a valuable set of insights can be inferred; generalizable properties of transmission which can be applied to understand the non-observable ranges of periodic phenomena. Among these generalizable characteristics are the properties of carrier medium and the mechanics of its density in nature, from which we may apply the model of carrier modulation to better understand the transmission of consciousness across unobservable or yet-immeasurable mediums in nature. By applying these established spectral models to conscious experience, we are afforded a set of useful new parameters with which to represent the ranges of human awareness and the discrete states which divide our consciousness systemically, as distinct ranges of frequency, or bandwidths.
I submitted this abstract to the Science of Consciousness conference, which is typically held in Arizona. Yet, to my surprise as I went to submit it, I found that, for the first time in over 20 years, this year’s conference will be held at the University of Helsinki! Somehow, it feels as though I am being called to Finland, whether I like it or not. Yet, I don’t know for what purpose or what I am to learn there. I have arranged to live in and explore the country for one month, all of June. I am hoping that there will be some answer there for me, but have no leads other than that it seems, once again, a meaningful coincidence that the first time I submit an application to this conference is the first time it has ever been held in Finland.
Is there any guidance available for someone in my condition? Any references or techniques that might help me to understand or overcome this challenging illness? The mysterious convulsive states, mediumship, and possession experiences have mostly subsided since abandoning my house in Michigan, yet I am well aware that I can reenter that spiritual aspect of my life, with meditation and with psychedelics. I am intimidated by the idea of doing so, however, especially given the chronic illness that followed my previous immersion into those spiritual ranges of nature. Yet, I am aware that these are exceptional and rare experiences and represent, in effect, the greatest potential of my life. I simply don’t know what to do with them.
How does a shaman heal himself? So that he may go on to heal others. Should I be following that typical pattern of initiation, and isolating from society and women? Or is solitude sometimes a dangerous thing, if left unfocused?
Thank you reading some of my stories. There are many others, but these were the big ones.
I flew into Lima, Peru and checked into a beautiful antique Spanish colonial building downtown, a mansion which had been converted into a hotel. I was given a cheap cubby room under the staircase - less than ideal, but I was just happy to crash heavily with my bags and relax after my long trip South.
That night, I had a powerful BIG dream. In it, I was approached by a male spirit who let me know that he had been orchestrating my life, and the coincidences which led me to Peru. He was a leader, and phenomenally powerful and spoke in images, scenes which he would present me within. He expressed that, while it may seem on the surface that I will be talking up on stage at this upcoming conference on shamanism, to be clear, it is actually HE who will be doing the talking. This was expressed by revealing the layers of the presentation, as it occurred; a sort of cross-cut of the reality of his influence over me. “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”
While he would allow me to appear to be performing, his massive presence was behind me the whole time, guiding and informing the real message up through me, to be expressed to the audience. It was a deeply powerful presence, as if being near the president or some other influential leader, and I awoke in awe of this figure and the breadth of his power, having seen his ability to control and orchestration circumstance in time from his side, to serve his ends. I was such a small and minor individual, in comparison, yet the attention would be on me at this important event; a sort of front which I would represent.
I awoke with my heart racing, buzzing across my body, and quickly wrote down as much of the experience as I could at a fevered pace, the excitement and awe of it all still fresh in my mind. This was big! Much bigger than me. The inexplicable synchronicities that had fallen so stepwise into place, and led me to the conference, suddenly made more sense after this interaction with this powerful “no nonsense” entity, and the message he conveyed.
Within a few days, I was arranging my travel to Iquitos. It is a unique city, as there are no roads in or out - it is nestled so deep in the Upper Amazon Basin that it can only be reached by small airplane or extended boat trips up the Amazon river. I had setup living arrangements and a flight into their little airfield, there, and was set to meet the head of the conference the following day.
Culture shock struck as I exited the plane into that sweltering unrelenting wet jungle heat. My Scandinavian blood is very thick for that kind of equatorial climate! I was sunburnt within the hour. I noticed the desperation and poverty rampant in that city, cut off from the commerce and culture of the capital. Very few cars, but for a few soles, I could get a ride on a motorcycle driven cart, a homemade woven seat with a metal roof to block the blaring sun. Soon, I was at the residence of Alan Shoemaker, the man who organized the shamanism conference I’d be presenting at in a few days.
Now, I’d been working in Stanford’s Psychophysiology lab for months, in Palo Alto, studying the EEG signature of emotional regulation. Yet, all the while I’d been there, I’d been trying to integrate into Stanford’s culture - specifically the subculture of creative writing and psychedelics, which I knew existed in within the walls of that institution somewhere. I wanted to meet the hippie Stanfordites, reciting poetry and having existential adventures together. But actually finding these students or professors, who I knew existed somewhere in there, was proving much harder than I’d anticipated. I’d sit on a bench and strike up a conversation with someone who seemed receptive to that sort of creative lifestyle, yet came up short again and again. It was frustrating and I had been just close to giving up on the hope of finding “my people” at Stanford.
Within an hour of arriving to this interesting walled compound of Alan Shoemaker’s, I was introduced to one of the other presenters who had arrived: a tallish Native American looking girl named Lyla. She offered me a bottle of beer and I thanked her, taking out the bottle opener on my keychain to open it. This opener was a simple black piece of plastic with the worn logo, “Fatty Zone,” on it; a local head shop near my house where I’d gotten it for free. Seeing this, she said “Wait…you know Fatty Zone?”
“Yea! Its 3 blocks from my house…”
“Fatty Zone is 3 blocks from my house…!” she said, checking the address on the keychain.
Sure enough, it turns out that Lyla was a student at Stanford. And, sure enough, she proceeded to explain that she was the president of Stanford’s creative writing society…and that she was Stanford’s main source for psychoactive substances, which she considered it her mission to share and distribute. She was the person I’d been trying to meet for months, but I had to go to the other side of the world to find her!
Certain relationships feel as though they were “meant” to happen, and ours was one such relationship. Over time, she would introduce me to countless powerfully meaningful things, everything I needed to find on Stanford’s campus and a network of people who would prove to change my life irreversibly. Becoming active in Stanford’s poetry circle, and reading on stage in their competitions (one of which I won) was a pivotal moment for me and the development of my voice as a writer.
That first night in Iquitos, I was bombarded by a second overwhelmingly powerful visionary dream, in which I interacted with some individual or spirit. It began by my introduction to a short native man with black hair to his shoulders and a paunch and a very distinct face. He held a bottle of ayahuasca in one hand, in the other hand he held out a large seed. He explained that the ayahuasca, by itself, does not teach. Pouring the brew over the seed, he said the ayahuasca only allows the teacher plant to open and be heard. With this, the seed sprouted into a beautiful flowered vine and, with its blossoming, there was a message it conveyed, one I could not otherwise have heard.
This stocky native man then led me down through a hole into the Earth, down beneath the trees of the forest, a tunnel through the soil, into the root systems of the trees. There he explained that, in order to hear the plants, you must get beneath, down into the roots, in the subconscious of the plants - that that is where they talk to one another, in those spreading systems of intertwined roots. That is where you can hear them. Sure enough, I could hear many quiet conversations of the forest, there, the many voices and personalities of the plants I’d only seen and known the “surface half” of. This is where their they express themselves, in the medium of the Earth.
I awoke from this dream, again, half hyperventilating. There was so much information being conveyed to me, I tried as best I could to write it all down, but it was overwhelming. I know many of the details were lost in translation, to writing, but the main “take home” of this big dream was recorded. Later, I learned that this idea of a “teacher plant,” separate from the ayahuasca, is actually an established facet of shamanic work in the Amazon - that shamans even categorize different types of teaching or healing into different strains and species of plants, which they can call on as needed. A botanical toolbox of healing knowledge, which the shaman utilizes in a systematic way, based on the needs of his patients and his chosen specialty. The fact that all of this fairly-specific belief system came to me, first, in a visionary dream seemed a powerful testament to the legitimacy of that “interaction” I experienced. That was no dream!
The next day was the first official day of the conference, a casual meet and greet ramping up to the actual presentations. The courtyard, near the pool, was filled with people - about 45 different presenters and people selling trinkets and so on. Sitting by the pool, I was approached by an elderly bald man named Freddy, who was quite an interesting decidedly-shifty sort of character who tried, and succeeded, to sell me a tarot card reading using regular playing cards. In this reading, he claims to have been able to tell that I was dealing with an illness - a safe bet, perhaps cold reading. I proceeded to tell him briefly about the illness and the possession experience that had immediately preceded it.
Freddy nodded, listening to my story, seemingly concerned. When I finished, he said “Yes! It is a spirit illness. For what you need, you need to talk to Javier de Silva.”
He pointed across the yard of 45 people to a man standing near the far doorway. He was a short native man, with black hair down to his shoulders, and a paunch. It was the him! The man from the night previous, exactly him, down to the distinctive mole on his face. This shaman, Javier, looked at me from across the room with a mischievous knowing smile, nodding in acknowledgement of me and, apparently, laughing at my astonishment. He recognized me as well!
The Shipibo Ceremonies
Despite the strong synchronicities and dream interactions with Javier de Silva, I ended up avoiding him. Many had said he was a “Brujo” who was once a very powerful and good-hearted healer, but had lost his way and fallen from the path. Other foreigners told me he had threatened them and tried to manipulate them, saying they would be bitten by snakes or have family members die if they did not give him money. All of these rumors frightened me, as he seemed like a dark or mischievous figure, so I sought out more traditional and isolated shamans, further away from the touristy Iquitos.
I was able to find someone to guide me to a remote area deep in the jungle, up river, where some native Shipibo tribespeople lived. Getting to them involved riding a homemade boat up river for 3 hours, and then, from there, hiking into the jungle for 2 and a half hours. There I met with them and lived for about 3 months.
The shamans were women; radiant, smiling grandmother figures who sang such beautiful breathy icaros, harmonizing in high-pitched steps during ceremony. We drank almost every night, in intensive sessions, trying to clean out the body for further work. Understanding what these shamans said after the session was very difficult, as no one who spoke Shipibo knew any English.
The lead shaman would speak about what she saw during her ceremony with me, seemingly explaining with great detail the specifics of her journey and the diagnosis, talking for many minutes. Yet, this message first had to be fully translated from Shipibo to Spanish after she was done speaking, and then a second translator would have to break down the gist of the message and translate it from Spanish to English. By the time it finally got across to me, all that was left of those many minutes of explanation would be “She says the medicine is good for you.” She said more than that!!
One thing that did come across was that the ayahuasca would, first, clean the body out and that this process would take about a week, when coupled with the dieta. As I understood it, the body in this case could be compared to a window. When I arrived, it was very crudy, I imagined it like the window above a greasy burger grill, caked with many years of thick smoke, so that it could hardly be seen through. Ayahuasca’s deep intensive purges felt like a scouring of this greasy window, it often felt like I was expelling some black oily sickness from down deep. Yet, this purging also had a psychological aspect, as with every heaving release, I would see painful memories or dark traumas being brought up and out from where they had been, in those thick sedimentary layers down below.
It was only after this window has been scoured clean that light can shine through it again. This radiant light is something visible in the clean bright eyes of the old Shipibo women, their open arms and their open sensitive hearts. Its only when that window is completely clean that you can begin to see through it, to see the visions of the other side, those subtle energetic phenomena which are obscured by the residue of unclean living.
At a point around a week in, I can recall standing outside the maloka near this lagoon, with my hand against a strange Amazonian tree, just leaning in as I scream heaved at 1 in the morning. I was truly working hard, bringing up something from deep in my core, something that had needed to be expelled for many years. And, finally…it was out! That first breath afterwards, that long inhale, was simply the fullest cleanest breath I can recall having in my life; as if some weight had finally been lifted from my chest, and, all at once, I could breath freely again, open and unrestrained. That was when I knew I was clean.
The visions began in full force after that. There were many spiritual phenomena that occurred in those months which were powerful and unexplainable, suggesting there are untapped potentials available in the higher ranges of human sensitivity. I will described a handful of the most meaningful.
Meditation
Meditation on ayahuasca changed some aspect of the room, as if my presence came to expand to fill the space and influence those within it in distinct ways; no doubt reliant, too, on their hypersensitive state of attention. I sat Indian-style about 10 feet from the shamans, allowing my breath to be as full and slow as my capacity allowed. These long exhales became longer and calmer, until I reached nearly a breathless state, my chest throbbing and vibrant with the same nervous energy I had experienced previously, during the EKG incidents, yet calmed and flowing.
Silently breathing in this way, somehow the shamans began to respond to these meditative breaths. At the peak of a silent inhale, and then the slow calm release, two of the shamans would “sighhhh” right alongside my exhale, which was silent and not audible to them. Somehow, their breathing rhythms had fallen into perfect sync with my own, and the full almost overwhelming charge in my rib cage, being released, was influencing their subjective state as well; a kind of entrainment. Although, of course, I could not make any real assumptions about the nature of their subjective state in that moment, the long trancey sigh that we shared could be felt as a deeply fulfilling and almost orgasmic-sounding state of ecstasy. They were riding my deep meditative breaths with me, as if I was doing the “work” and they were enjoying the long pregnant cycles of charged breath, which they were able to perceive in some subtle energetic way in the room. Their singing of the icaros was distinctly different after this meditative connection we shared, especially beautiful and transcendent. I became, in that moment of shared ecstatic exhalation, aware of the profound power of breath.
In other instances, my breathing would seem to induce powerful energetic phenomena in my nervous system, similar to the convulsive states I’d experienced years previous, tied to my quivering chest. This ayahuasca meditation, lying on the floor, would come as great quaking pulses, up through my core, causing my whole body to move dramatically at a rhythm distinct from my heartbeat. Chairs and beds would creak and pulse, moving under me during these mysterious and overwhelming energetic states.
Disease Extraction
Early in the 3 months of sessions, I let the shamans know that I had an illness. Yet, I was careful not to tell them anything about the nature of the illness, or its location in the body. I admit, I was skeptical, and wanted to test this supposed ability to see and extract disease during these ceremonies. I said nothing more, other than that I was sick, so there would be no bias or hints for her to “cold read.”
The shaman drank aya with me and looked at my body, scanning me, and placing her open hands over me. She said she saw the illness in my gut - which was correct. She then began an extraction, using tobacco juice, which she spit onto my stomach as she sucked the sickness out, and dramatically spit it into a bucket with gusto, almost as if vomiting. Then again, she would go in and pull the energetic signature of my illness out, and expel it into the bucket. Finally, this bucket was brought way out into the forest and its contents disposed of in a certain way.
What is interesting is, 2 days later, after my presentation at the shamanism conference, I had a ceremony with an Ecuadorian shaman. I, again, was careful not to tell him anything about my illness or its location in the body, only to say that I was sick and needed healing. He drank a strong brew and scanned my body as I laid on the floor of the hut. He finally said he could see the illness in my lower gut - which was correct. He then said that he could see that someone had recently tried to extract it, but that they didn’t get it all out! I was in awe. He could perceive the extraction that had taken place 2 days before, somehow! He had not known of my visiting that distant Shipibo shaman, and had not spoken with them. My skepticism of the legitimacy of the extraction procedure dissolved away…
The Finns
In terms of my limited previous knowledge of the plant medicine ayahuasca, I can say I was aware of the native belief system surrounding it, specifically that it was the “vine of souls” and would facilitate communication with spirits and ancestors. I had heard that, in the Amazon, the ayahuasca experience was referred to as the “little death” -- just a tiny death! Real quick, dying, talking to grandma and grampa, and then coming back. Suffice it to say, I was skeptical going into the jungle of this native belief system, or that the nature of one’s ethnicity or ancestry played any major role in the circumstances of one’s daily life, outside the obvious role of genetic predispositions, carried down the lines of lineage. Yet, again, in this case, when I left Peru, I was no longer skeptical…
I laid in the dark of the maloka, meditating on the gentle icaros, the old spiritual songs being sang to guide my inward journey. With my eyes closed there was a gradual but unambiguous sensation of ascent, felt in my chest, much like the tunnel experience with the lion entity in Michigan. This ascent continued for some time, until I reached a higher place which was separated by the edges of a tunnel I was stepping out of. This higher place was forested, coniferous, and I was high in the treetops. There were two entities of blue-white light who saw and greeted me, and seemed very aware of my coming here.
The female spoke “We are the Finns… we are the Finns…”
She continually emphasized this fact, as if she was not sure her message was coming across to me, it was repeated several times.
Finally, “We are the Finns. We are here to teach you…to see and hear more.”
This bright and benevolent being then explained “We live in the higher frequencies, where sound becomes light.”
When she said that, somehow, it made perfect sense - at least while I was there, in that place and that state-of-consciousness. It seems certain statements only make sense within the state-of-consciousness which produced them.
I was shown the facilities in this Finnish realm, and the many students who were there, learning to “see and hear more.”
Returning down to my body, and reimmersing myself into physicality, I was quite amazed, but at the same time thinking “Wow! Whatever THAT just was…” as if to disregard the incredible encounter as something unreal, just by its sheer exceptionality.
Yet, just a few hours later, I was having breakfast on the sidewalk at the Yellow Rose of Texas, a popular restaurant in downtown Iquitos. Enjoying my food there, with a table to myself, I heard “Suomalainen tyttö, hän tulee olemaan hienoa...”
I looked up and, directly to my right sat two tall blondes. I had to ask them “Excuse me, are you Finnish?”
“Yah! We are Finnish. How did you know?”
“I’m Finnish. I’d recognize Finnish a mile away…”
The odds of this occurrence! Of them sitting directly next to me, given all of the places they could sit, and times they could have sat there. I had to ask them,
“What are two Finns doing in the middle of the Amazon rainforest on a Thursday morning?”
They explained that their daughter was going to school in Peru, and so on. I explained to them that my grandma’s grandma was a shaman, or noaide, in Finland and that I’d always wanted to know more about what she did, and how she healed people - that all of that heritage was lost with the immigration to America.
Immediately, they responded “Oh, yes! You must speak with Anna-Leena. She is the head of the Finnish spirituality department at the University of Helsinki. Here is her number, and here is her email address.”
They had all of that information immediately on hand, knew her number by heart, and wrote this Finnish shamanism expert’s contact down for me. So, in the vision the night before, the Finns told me they would teach me. It wasn’t until a few hours later that I got directions to the school.
I was absolutely overwhelmed by the implications of this meeting. The sheer astronomical improbability of those two Finns choosing to sit next to me, at that exact moment AND happening to be very close friends with a foremost world-renowned expert on Finnish shamanism, Dr. Anna-Leena Siikala. I was simply awestruck.
I realized that this medicine, ayahuasca, was powerful in ways that I did not understand, in the manner that it orchestrated and arranged these meaningful and even life-altering coincidences with such perfect synchrony. The ancestry seemed central to this synchrony, somehow - not my Swedish side, but this Finnish side of my DNA seemed to be resonating very strongly in response to this medicine.
Yet, I’ve learned that these phenomenally meaningful coincidences can be arranged for one’s benefit, seemingly by ancestral spirits presenting important opportunities, like gifts containing new life directions, having an opportunity does not, necessarily, mean I accept those opportunities. That is to say, they won’t do the work for you! They’ll reveal a path, but it is still my choice to walk it. I never called Anna-Leena Siikala and, eventually, lost the slip of paper with her number. I feel guilt when I think of what that connection to the University of Helsinki could have opened in my life and my progress in understanding some of these experiences I’ve had.
Current Condition
The unusual illness with followed that first possession experience, shared with my girlfriend in Michigan, has continued to progress and worsen with time, despite the increased dosages of cortical steroids and chemotherapy drugs, intended to keep the inflammation at bay. I am overwhelmed with weakness and whole body pain, often unable to walk or climb stairs. I feel as though a heavy weight has been shackled to me, preventing me from doing all of the things I love and need to do, or expressing myself in the free and joyous way I once did, before the possession.
Yet, as strange as it sounds, I have come to see the illness as a strict and unrelenting guide, to keep me on the path of clarity. The only way I have found to be healthy is by fasting, or near fasting, keeping a clean and active lifestyle in place, free of alcohol, oils, sugar, meat, and caffeine - all things which I love and would definitely indulge in were it not for the immediate and stern “punishment” I receive from my body as a result. With these limitations in place, the only way to survive and live without pain seems to be in adopting a lifestyle of dietary restraint and solitude, one which I cannot help but notice parallels the lifestyle of the shamanic initiate in many cultures.
Harner writes about this illness resulting from a spiritual interaction, calling it the “initiatory illness,” in which the afflicted individual must confront his sickness by following a calling to shamanic work, one laid out by powerful coincidences and dreams. The closer you are to the path, the more these meaningful coincidences will occur - that that is a sign you are close and have the attention of the spirit guides on you. On the other hand, if this initiate chooses to ignore this call to healing work, and step away from the path laid out before him, the illness will progress until it overtakes him, until he essentially goes crazy and dies.
I don’t want to go crazy and die! Yet, the degradative changes that continue to occur as I try to live a “normal” life, and ignore those spiritual experiences that have defined a decade of my development, are getting harder and harder to manage. Our culture has no place for these phenomena, and there is no track for young men who show signs of hypersensitivity like that early on to follow, towards a purposeful role in society. Transpersonal psychology seems the closest thing to shamanism Western culture has to offer, yet I was expelled from the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology for sharing my possession experience with my class, being denied access to higher education based on my spiritual beliefs because, so they told me, it “made some of the other students feel uncomfortable.”
I have written an abstract, describing that perception of the ranges of consciousness as discrete bandwidths which one may traverse; descending down through the spectra of distinct frequency ranges as one falls asleep, for instance, from Beta, thru Alpha, into Theta towards Delta, these measurable frequencies represent:
Consciousness research has reached a standstill, according to eminent theoretician, Bernard Baars, during a recent Stanford University symposium. While I am in agreement with Baars that there have been few major advances in the field for some time, part of the problem seems to be that we’ve exhausted the utility of our current metaphors. For this reason, I’d like to propose a new metaphor: a model which conceptualizes consciousness as a spectrum of frequencies whose natural division into discrete bandwidths defines the boundaries of state-specific content and perception. By defining consciousness in terms of radiant spectra, many of the known laws governing the electromagnetic spectrum can be applied to comprehend the subtle mechanics of subjectivity, objectivity, states of consciousness, dimensionality, and sensate awareness. In thinking of consciousness as information traversing a medium, we are granted a new set of analogies with which we can apply the well-defined principles of telecommunication to understand facets of awareness previously outside the limits of our purview. By modeling consciousness in this way, and utilizing the known processes governing modulatory phenomenon, a valuable set of insights can be inferred; generalizable properties of transmission which can be applied to understand the non-observable ranges of periodic phenomena. Among these generalizable characteristics are the properties of carrier medium and the mechanics of its density in nature, from which we may apply the model of carrier modulation to better understand the transmission of consciousness across unobservable or yet-immeasurable mediums in nature. By applying these established spectral models to conscious experience, we are afforded a set of useful new parameters with which to represent the ranges of human awareness and the discrete states which divide our consciousness systemically, as distinct ranges of frequency, or bandwidths.
I submitted this abstract to the Science of Consciousness conference, which is typically held in Arizona. Yet, to my surprise as I went to submit it, I found that, for the first time in over 20 years, this year’s conference will be held at the University of Helsinki! Somehow, it feels as though I am being called to Finland, whether I like it or not. Yet, I don’t know for what purpose or what I am to learn there. I have arranged to live in and explore the country for one month, all of June. I am hoping that there will be some answer there for me, but have no leads other than that it seems, once again, a meaningful coincidence that the first time I submit an application to this conference is the first time it has ever been held in Finland.
Is there any guidance available for someone in my condition? Any references or techniques that might help me to understand or overcome this challenging illness? The mysterious convulsive states, mediumship, and possession experiences have mostly subsided since abandoning my house in Michigan, yet I am well aware that I can reenter that spiritual aspect of my life, with meditation and with psychedelics. I am intimidated by the idea of doing so, however, especially given the chronic illness that followed my previous immersion into those spiritual ranges of nature. Yet, I am aware that these are exceptional and rare experiences and represent, in effect, the greatest potential of my life. I simply don’t know what to do with them.
How does a shaman heal himself? So that he may go on to heal others. Should I be following that typical pattern of initiation, and isolating from society and women? Or is solitude sometimes a dangerous thing, if left unfocused?
Thank you reading some of my stories. There are many others, but these were the big ones.