Sacred Medicines, Sacred Ceremonies, Sacred Sites
Tour to Peru, June 3-23 2006
with Peter Gorman
www.greatmystery.org/events/amazon.html

You are invited to consider joining legendary guide to the Peruvian Amazon Peter Gorman for an amazing adventure into Sacred Medicines, Sacred Ceremonies, and Sacred Sites.

For nearly 20 years, Peter Gorman has worked with traditional shamanic visionary medicine, and Master Plant Teacher of the Amazon.

While his work as a journalist has taken him from the streets of New York to the back alleys of Bombay, since 1984 Peter Gorman has made a point of spending at least 3 months annually in the jungle around Iquitos, Peru, and at least part of that time with the elderly curandero Don Julio Jerena.

The June Peru voyage will be one of incredible healing and discovery.

From: Ayahuasca Healing and an Inkling of Darkness
by Peter Gorman

Of all the people who had ever been with me drinking ayahuasca I have always known that I’ve been the most frightened. I would keep an eye on them as best I could, watch them as they cleansed themselves, bent over a railing or crumpled on a raised platform hut’s flooring absolutely giving themselves over to the powers that held them, unable to control the simplest body movements and even then knew they were less terrified than me. It was an awful feeling to be able to explain things about ayahuasca to people yet know that each time I drank I had less control over what would happen to and with me, not more. My experience wasn’t a shield, it was a door that was opened wider and wider to allow bigger and bigger monsters through.

They weren’t real monsters coming through, of course. They were the monsters that were me, or the visualization of the monsters that dwell in the horror men do one another. But the doorway was a real doorway. Not something one could grasp or see, just a kind of opening that allows one to glimpse what exists on other levels. All of it filtered through humanness, our vision needing to see a shape to grasp the isness of something; our hearing allowing us to imagine sounds in order to give meaning to something or someone.

My guests would sometimes ask if what they had seen while drinking ayahuasca was an hallucination or a vision. I only knew how to answer for myself. Years earlier I’d gone through a terrible blackness in search of my dead mother at the behest of my father who’d come to me in a dream. And after an eternity of that empty black space I’d come on a wall of white gauze which seemed to me to be the wall beyond which lay the world of the dead. Out of it my mother’s figure formed like a computer graphic in a movie—ten years before computer graphics like that were even imagined.

When she came together she said “You’ve got to stop calling me like this. It’s so hard to come together in a shape you recognize as me.”

Later I realized that had I been given endless time to make a list of ten thousand or a million things I might imagine my mother saying on seeing me for the first time since she’d died, that would not have been on it. And that became my rule for discerning between an hallucination and a vision: if something seen or heard or felt would not have been on a list of 10,000 possibilities, if it were nothing I’d ever dreamt or imagined or read or seen, then it was a vision. I don’t know how to prove that true, or if I need to, but that’s how I see it.

Don Julio Jerena - photo by Ron Terner

THE DOCTORS AND THE HEART HEALING

In the time since I’d first tasted ayahuasca more than 15 years ago, it had become an important part of my life. But at age 49, with a marriage that was still falling apart two years into its collapse, a couple of teenage boys who wondered what I’d done to make mom leave, and a three-year-old girl who wondered why she didn’t live with her brothers, I was wondering more and more if there was any point. I knew the power of ayahuasca. I knew that the curandero with whom I drank whenever possible, Julio Jerena, was an impeccable man with a generosity I admired tremendously. But Julio’s women left him as well, and his kids, all grown, had their own problems. So what was the point of it all? Was there another side to come out on? Was it just a process? Have I learned anything I wouldn’t have without spending all those nights in the jungle? Did I get any magic tricks yet?

Not at all. Maybe I’m just a lousy student. Maybe there are none to get. But then maybe I’ve gotten much more than super powers and just have to tilt my head and life a little to see it.

Damned if I knew. But there I was again, out on the Ucayali river at night, dead center of Peru’s Amazon with a dazzling sky overhead traveling on a riverboat. With me were five new friends, clients who’d paid to come to the jungle with me to see things they’d only imagined from movies, and to drink ayahuasca. They would be the experience of the river system around Iquitos, travel on an overcrowded, flat-bottomed riverboat with the people who lived in the area, see river towns, go night fishing and hiking through the jungle muck. There would be glorious sunsets, the wonder of the bromeliads and wild orchids, the danger of falling from a canoe into rivers where caiman lived, the possibility of being nipped by vampire bats, and a visit with Julio, about whom most had read. There were a thousand other things that would occur, of course, some fantastic, some quite scary, but then that’s probably why they’d come.

I rarely if ever asked them, thinking they’d come because they were drawn by some childhood fantasy of the jungle, just like the rest of us who spent time there. That and the possibility that when they drank ayahuasca they would glimpse something that gave a deeper meaning to their lives, something that justified them being here. It was a question that generally came up only obliquely.

Ayahuasca: Healing and and Inkling of Darkness is running as a two parter in the Winter (current) and Spring issues of The Entheogen Review, a small but respected magazine in the consciousness community.

(The use of indigenous ceremonial plants is legal and accepted in Peru.)

For more information: www.greatmystery.org/events/amazon.html