The shaman had brewed a batch and had it in an old Dr. Pepper plastic bottle someone had found floating down the Pastaza River. Floating down from a civilization this community knew almost nothing about. We were on the border between Peru and Ecuador over 100 miles from the nearest road living with people who knew nothing about countries, or plastic, or sugary commercial drinks. No contact with electricity, TV, radio, newspapers or written language.
I drank my shot of what the Achuar tribe called Natem. A few minutes later I was watching a show of neon colors. Eight sided patterns. The colors changing faster toward the center of the pattern. I could sense that near the center the changes were happening faster than my perception could keep up with.
About this time the poison kicks in. I was ushered out of the lodge and held as intestinal retching kicked in. Vomiting removes the toxins. I couldn’t do it. I had trained myself from the age of 8 to not ever, ever throw up. At that time I was in a Catholic grade school with horrible lunches. Kids threw up every day. The nuns made them clean up their messes. The bathroom and any where near it was a toxic zone that actually caused many more heave-ho’s. I had prided myself on this ability to not throw up. Now it was about to kill me. Eventually they laid me on a large banana leaf. I laid there for hours, under the bright starlight of the Milky Way, making unearthly guttural sounds that scared everyone around me.
Charlotte and two other travelers had taken the ayahuasca. Charlotte was blowing everything in her out both ends. She had two helpers and embarrassment was the least of her concerns. She could hear what I was going through. Must have thought I was dying. Her helpers told her not to worry about me to just worry about herself, but she insisted, “Don’t tell me not to be concerned about him. He is the love of my life, I will be concerned about him!”
By the middle of the night I was exhausted from the convulsions and still freaking everyone out with sounds that should never come from a human or be heard by other humans. The shaman had me brought back into his lodge.
I sat before him on a small stool. He reached in my mouth and pulled my tongue out as far as it would go. With a small straw he began sucking with all his might on different parts of my tongue. I was barely conscious, but I had no choice but to fully trust that this was the right treatment.
Back to the banana leaf and slowly the retching subsided. By morning, I was weak, could barely walk with help, but recovering.
All that drama was on one level. But there was another level that happened that night. I would summarize it as gaining direct confidence in the total oneness of everything. Whoever I thought I was when the night began, that somebody got left behind. I was out of my mind. The nearest I can describe it is as though I was in my DNA. I was DNA. And actually there was no clear edge of ‘my’ DNA and ‘not my’ DNA. All the DNA in other people there, in the plants, animals and bugs – no edges of separation. And quite amazing to me was that all DNA is in constant communication. I was staring up at the Milky Way and realizing the entire universe is filled with DNA – and in constant, instantaneous communication. And I realized that this DNA consciousness was greater than time or space. Time and space were mere constructs inside this DNA consciousness.
All this was 11 years ago, in 2008. Maybe Natem doesn’t ever entirely leave you once you’ve ingested it. That certainly feels true in my case. It’s a leap to go to oneness from daily western civilization consciousness with all our assumed separations, but there is something persistent inside of me that keeps me trying to restructure my reality into the oneness model. I know oneness is the truth. Realizing it is what the inner life is all about for me.