As the 6 of us began our one-hour
ascent to The Temple of the Moon no one spoke. A fevered storm had filled the
night. It was Dios De La Muerte and lightning flashed so bright as to
momentarily blind and then thunder would roll in minutes later, boom and echo
for what seemed like an eternity. Little did I know I would enter there myself.
Me, Ben, Chad, Mariana, Alej, and
Julianno (our shaman), swept forward with our heads bent just above the neck,
so as to stay the wind but keep the sight. We passed no other people on this
path but directly below us sat the ceremonial pits and stones where the Incans
would sacrifice and toss their human offerings. In front of us was where they
would bury their own and worship the moon.
We were already soaked fifteen
minutes in, as we slipped and wrestled with the mud and growing streams. My
pants weighed heavy with water and my poncho did little to keep the feeling
that this was fucking crazy off my back.
Once inside the cave we gathered
stones to sit and unpacked our supplies for the night, ours consisting of
blankets, water, and coca leaves. The Shamans of fur, tobacco, perfumes,
tinctures, ayahuasca, rattles, and a stick. He spoke in only Spanish and maybe Quechqua, but had assured me once the medicine took hold I would need not for
understanding.
The ceremony began with prayers and
offerings, he put some kind of magical seal over the cave entrance to protect
us, and we began in the dark with only the smoldering ash of incense burning.
He shook, pounded, mixed the ayahuasca in a cup and passed it first to Ben
(which worried me because I was told by a guide in the Amazon that the Shaman
should always drink it first), then he refilled it and passed it to me, around
the circle it went, until finally the Shaman poured for himself a large pull.
Slowly and unsteadily I had drank. Fear is what I felt and that I was stupid
for feeling it because maybe this was all bullshit.
For the first 20 minutes I sat with
my eyes closed and could see nothing but blackness, did I have no soul, no questions?
No vision at all I wondered? What could be worse? A growing sense of unease and
annoyance began to grow in me, it was freezing in this cave and silent.
Then he began to chant, I started to
feel a heat first in my legs and then wherever he directed it until my whole
body was warm. I started to feel very light and displaced in my seat. Slowly a
serpent started to form behind him and I leaned closer to rub my eyes disbelieving and see
it, not realizing that now I was way to close to him and knocking something
over. The sudden clash of realities immediately made me sick and I went outside
to vomit blackness upon blackness.
Out of the cave the world looked wilted and winded and
changing like it was inhaling and exhaling. Though I could tell it was raining
I couldn’t tell it was different from the trees behind it. Slowly like a
newborn trying to walk I made my way back into the cave and tried to find my
spot amongst them again, though this time it seemed much lower down and Ben towered
above me stoically while Mariana had completely disappeared into some kind of dark recess
right in front of me. The cave had quadrupled in size.
I began to swoon and had to lay back
from the Shaman as he chanted and spoke, then I realized by doing this I was
moving away from the ceremony and that without it I would be truly lost, possibly forever. I was
already tumbling thru geometric patterns and small Abysses. i had entered a long hallway with many keys and doors and at the end had chose to come back to my Shaman. As I leaned up to see him he turned first into a bear and then into a statue and then into all of his
ancestors flickering dead on his face at once. The walls behind him continued to produce streams of serpents and bulges.
Every question I asked of him he
answered simultaneously with the twists of the words in his song and non-verbal
communications. Everything he spoke of appeared, he told me to taste sweet and
I did. He led me up into the sun and we peeled back layers of deep blue
metallic inscriptions and crawled inside. Me and Ben began to speak telepathically.
The Shaman lead us up and across the entire universe and back. I understood
every word of Spanish he said without a single fault. At some point I receded
into myself and deep into the past/future where alternate versions of me each
came one by one and offered what gifts they had to give. The Shaman said “look
how quickly we can go from one world to the other, its right here, all existing
at once.” It was true in a span of less than then first hour I was watching
with no doubt, one foot in front of me what was a bear with the face of a
million dead leading me into the craziest most amazing thing I have ever
experienced in my life. He spit mouthfuls of perfume with his lips directly on
our heads. Any worry I had he immediately addressed with the boom of his stick or by simply leading me across a dimension where that worry no longer was relevant. The entire time I experienced the most extreme Deja-Vu. The ceremony winded out as if from a tunnel, he slowly took form
again by smoking a big jungle tobacco cigarette and letting me see the light on
his face as he flickered back and forth between all the shapes and then passing
me a cigarette allowed me to do the same as I went thru all of my past lives
and incarnations.
He said I didn’t have to remember
what had happened or what I had learned, my soul knew it now and carried it
with me as it always had. I was one step closer to the beautiful flight back of
true death…and when I needed more I could return to this source and drink again
of the medicine until someday I could go home. He would stay with me always as my brother and from my brothers I could drink as well as they would drink from me.
In my life I have never experienced
anything like this, shape shifting, ESP, thought-control, out of body,
projection, transcendence, universe, time-travel. I know that these are just the names we
have to put to things when the veil becomes lifted and we see that all things
are a single unit existing simultaneously, but holy fuck.
The walk back into Cusco seemed
perfect with time to adjust as eventually the city lights appeared below us and
fireworks lit the sky while they celebrated The Day of the Dead. We had lived
it a million times. We clasped each other and parted ways upon entering the
city.
That night I dreamed and left my
body many times again as I slept next to a beautiful Brazilian woman who had
led me here to all of this, and though after a week together the thought that she was leaving back to Brazil in the morning welled me up, I know now that The Thick is as much about beauty
and true gifts as it is about heartache and fistfights. We can use the bad in
us to fight for what is true in us. I will always be a little bit of a hooligan and a
roughneck but I have other masks that fit me better nowadays, I am a lover and
a leader too.
Yes we climbed Wannu and Macchu
Picchu, sand-boarded the immense dunes of Wachachina, Sailed out to see
sea-lions fight on the Ballestas Islands with TV star captain look-alikes, we
went to Catholic-Mass drunk with no sleep in the golden capital cathedrals of Lima, fell
asleep on dance floors that smelled of death, we ate beef hearts and gambled in the cities with all the earthquakes. Corey was here and gone, Chad came
down and imported a crazy white girl, and Ben is shacked up with Elizabeth who
I love in another hotel somewhere. Me, I’m just laying here with the smell
still on me waiting for the night-bus out of this city, south to Lake Titicaca, signing out from the end of The Thick as we know it.
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