All Kinds of Magic: One Man's Search for Meaning Across the Material World (34 page)

By six that evening we were in our places again. The shaman, who had been singing until dawn that morning, appeared as energised and present as before. He sat cross-legged, his dark eyes scanning the room with intensity.

‘So we are here once again,’ he said, smiling genially. ‘And, as those of you who have drunk before will know, the first night is merely a preparation for the one to come.’

Nervous laughter through the room.

‘Last night you began to open yourselves to the spirit world,’ he continued. ‘But tonight we must go further. We must use the knowledge we gathered last night to go deeper, to remain more focused on the breath. For those of you who wish, you may drink a second glass, or even a third. Tonight, we will see the spirits together.’

I drank again: the same faintly musty taste of bark and regeneration. I lay on my back under my sleeping bag, with crackling wood in the grate, aware of the bodies sprawled out on either side of me, each person falling back into the netherworlds of consciousness. In front, the shaman began his rattling again and, as the now familiar colour flashes took hold, I felt the ayahuasca world nudging against this.

This continued for some time, perhaps an hour. For some reason I seemed less inclined to welcome the visions this evening. As soon as they took hold I opened my eyes, or felt around in a panic for the plastic bag in case I needed to vomit. Inwardly, I could feel the pressure of the visions begin to build, like a river in spate pressing against a dam, and I lay on my back and let it fill me, my fists gently closed. When the shaman tapped me gently, I saw another glass in front of me, and I took it, swallowed it in a single gulp, then lay down again.

Before I knew it I was falling back through space, down a rabbit hole with neither beginning nor end, surrounded alternately by colours and darkness. After some time, I made out a white light in the distance. I could see figures moving within it and as I drew closer, I could see a small boy, perhaps ten years old, lying in a hospital bed. He seemed familiar, and the woman peering over his bed also someone I’d seen before. White sheets, an IV, yellow liquid passing from a nose drip.

A moment later I was observing the scene no more, I
was
the scene. The small body on the bed was me, and the woman my mother. Back in 1984, only eight years old, I’d suffered a burst appendix and been rushed to intensive care. It was an experience I’d almost never thought of since it happened. My memories of it were faint at best, yet here I was, with the clinical scents of the hospital room, the tubes and lights, and my mother’s face – twenty years younger – peering over me with that fierce protectiveness I knew so well.

As I looked out through the eyes of the child I’d once been, I felt an awareness I could never have had at the time. It was the strangest feeling: to be observing my younger self, and yet also to
be
my younger self again, to feel what I once felt, but with an adult consciousness now sorting through things which I couldn’t process at the time.

Fear was what I felt most. I could feel the profound terror of a boy, seriously ill, who didn’t really understand what had happened to him. A burning pain in the stomach, throbbing fiercely, combined with a sense of pure helplessness. I was a small animal, alone in the woods, stuck in pure fright. It was absolutely primal.

The vision began to shift again. Moving through the years that followed, like a photograph album blown from page to page at lightning speed, I retained the consciousness of the small boy I’d been, but saw, too, how that feeling of pain and helplessness had never really left me. In everything I’d done since, every decision, interaction and relationship, I’d held on to it, carried the weight of that fear like an unhealed wound festering below the surface.

The pain seemed to be getting worse. It started where my appendix had once been, spread out across my abdomen, up my chest, filling my entire body. I was clutching my side, moaning gently, the pain pulling me under. Was this remembered pain, or pain as I was feeling it now? For a time that could have been minutes or hours I lay there in this limbo, struggling for breath.

Just when I thought I was at my limit, I began to vomit. Vomiting is one of the hardest experiences for the novice of ayahuasca to come to grips with. One of the great social stigmas, it seems to reduce us to the animal realm, causing feelings of embarrassment like almost no other human experience.

But when one is
doing
it, no such awareness exists. Like a dog that’s chewed grass then slinks off into the woods to purge itself, I began to retch. I was purging out the pain that had lain dormant in me for more than twenty years. I was purging out childishness and pure fear. In a flash I saw myself in some jungle clearing, surrounded by other young men, engaged in some primal coming of age ritual. I was shrugging off childish things and becoming an adult. I could feel strength pouring down on me, filling me, so that I fought back the urge to let out some primal roar.

Coming to, I felt someone take away the plastic bag in my hands and replace it with a clean one. Something truly malevolent had passed out of me; I could feel it moving away from me in the room like some dark radioactive substance. Now that I’d vomited I could feel myself leaving the ayahuasca realms, coming back into the room where all these different people fought their battles, and yet now I wished to stay. I was filled with bliss, with lightness. Like a man who’s carried stones upon his back without realising it, I was free of some terrible burden, feather-light. Everything would be different from here on.

Sleep beckoned. I felt its pull, yearned to fall back into it. But I could hear a voice, a persistent whisper. Opening my eyes I saw Agata standing over me.

‘Come,’ she said. ‘It is time for the sweat lodge. Come with me.’

To one side of the house was a tepee, a conical tent made of canvas stretched over tall sapling poles. Moving slowly, and with my stomach still burning from the ayahuasca, I followed the others through the darkness. Dawn was not yet upon us, and it was absolutely quiet out here; our breath was streaming. Beside the tepee a bonfire roared, and the yellow light warped and shifted under the influence of the drug. Beneath my feet the grass was soft and layered with rime.

I stripped down to my underwear, stepped inside the tent. We sat in two concentric circles, women on one side, men on the other. In the middle of the tent was a hole into which enormous glowing basalt rocks were being carefully placed. I saw the shaman’s face as he dropped the glowing stones from a pair of blacksmith’s tongs. Suffused with an unearthly glow, his eyes were wild and lit up with ayahuasca, and yet he was also entirely ‘here’, monitoring each and every person in the room, his consciousness everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

Within minutes the temperature in the sweat or ‘medicine’ lodge was unbearable. The canvas door was now closed, and about twenty of us were sealed within this small structure. I’d experienced saunas before, and even a sweat lodge of sorts, but this was incomparably hotter. I felt that if the temperature moved merely one degree hotter, my very skin would peel off.

‘This heat is medicine,’ announced the shaman. ‘When you think you can’t take any more, surrender. When your mind begins to break, surrender. If you want to cry out, cry out.
Feel
the medicine purifying you.’

He began to sing again, and to the sound of
icaros
I drifted back into the ayahuasca realms, then back into this one, both of them united by a sense of heat that was more than any human could bear. On the other side of the tent a girl wailed and screamed, and then more screams joined hers, screams of pain, screams of surrender. Sweat poured from us in torrents, rivers of sweat, the skin sloughing away.

Next some nettle branches were passed around, and although in a normal situation this might have been the straw that broke the camel’s back, I accepted one and used it to rub my skin, the prickling opening up the physical body still further, releasing memories, stored experience, all the unresolved minutiae of life. Some burst into hysterical laughing, from the other side of madness – and I found myself joining in. The laughter of the insane, of those who had passed caring.

More stones were added to the fire. Visions appeared and passed away. Against my back I could feel the canvas of the tepee and for a blissful moment I imagined ripping through the entire tent, breaking my way out to the other side. I could feel the strength of bears welling up in me.

‘Surrender,’ came the shaman’s voice. ‘There is only
this
moment.’

Perhaps a half an hour passed. The limits of all of our endurances were passed a hundred times, a thousand. Time lost all meaning, and so it was simply not possible to rationalise this place as a hell realm, some purgatory we were forced to endure. We were simply here, trapped in the moment. Death would have been the most blissful release.

And then at last – dreamlike, ethereal – the door opened. Outside a pale, almost mauve light told me dawn had broken. Very slowly, crawling on hands and knees, we moved towards that ecstatically cool portal, hardly daring to dream of what it might feel like. Ten people were ahead of me, five.

I hardly remember what came next. One minute I was on my hands and knees, drenched in sweat, the next I was lying face down on the grass, sobbing great lungfuls of air. Released from some primordial womb, I felt as new and empty as any six-pound baby.

Opening my eyes, I saw the green fields swathed in mist. Steam was pouring off our bodies, and I simply gave into the moment at last, weeping like a child. I couldn’t stop.

Over the weeks that followed this ayahuasca retreat, I seemed to grow into a new lease of life. Something profound had healed in me; I left Barcelona bursting with vitality, several feet taller. Even on a purely physical level, the drug had worked with a potency greater than any holistic detox or vitamin regime imaginable. I felt, at last, as if I had broken through the firmament.

But more than this side effect, a greater shift had taken place within my consciousness. Certain workings of the mind had been revealed, glimpses of another world that still danced beyond the line of sight. I thought again of
soma
, the sacramental drink of the Rig Veda, and of the eleusinian mysteries of ancient Greece. Part of the Demeter cult, these annual initiation ceremonies, which lasted for two millennia, were believed to unite the participant with the gods through the use of a sacred drink,
kykeon
.

How can these plant substances, used in every culture, broaden our fields of perception? Certainly, the notion that drug use is merely an escape is absurd for anyone who has drunk ayahuasca. No one would subject themselves to such a forceful smashing of the ego for the sake of mere distraction. To drink the liquid is to be engaged in a conscious process of discovery and investigation. What is real? What lies beyond? What secrets lie beyond our cognitive horizons that can raise our quality of life, make us better human beings?

For me, the participatory nature of the ayahuasca experience made it life-changing, while most of the other things I’d witnessed were merely interesting, cause for reflection. Ayahuasca took me
into
the spirit world that the oracles knew, it showed me the intricate constructions of ego upon which I’d based my dreams and aspirations. At the beginning of my quest I’d read of Maya, the veil of illusion which the Buddhist and Hindu scriptures say trap human beings in separateness. In a single dose of ayahuasca this was no longer an idea, but a lived reality. There
were
illusory structures keeping us in ignorance. They were the structures our world was built on: a world of short-term pleasure, of celebrity and the need for outside affirmation of who we were.

It seemed I’d come the full circle: from innocence to experience. The true ‘enlightenment’ – permanent immersion in that world beyond the veil – eluded me yet. But I knew now what it was, and it loomed in my sights at every moment, as the true goal of human existence, the
meaning
I’d been trying to find from the beginning.

Festival of the Flying Monks

Far above us, on the crumbling parapet of Matho monastery, I saw the first of Ladakh’s two most powerful oracles stumble drunkenly to the edge. Then the other joined him, prompting a wail of terror from the crowd. The oracles were wearing long black wigs which spilled down their backs, their eyes blindfolded with black cloth. One of them held a sword in his hand and he was slashing the air with it, causing the High Lamas to rush backwards to safety.

I felt my breath draw in. If Norbu’s sister had exuded great power, then these oracles were of a different order entirely. It was like looking upon a bear, or some creature that could simply crush one into a pulp. It wasn’t their physical appearance, though, that created this impression. It was the power which coursed through them. More than anything I’d seen, these men seemed possessed of a supernatural energy of some kind, and I found myself scarcely able to look upon them, as they ran madly from one end of the parapet to the other, emitting high-pitched shrieking noises, seemingly unafraid of falling. The pink-cheeked little girl next to me buried her face in her mother’s skirt.