Caspar Greeff is a journalist who covers current affairs and lifestyles in South African newspapers such as Cape Argus, Sunday Times, and the Times.

The Ayahuasca Diaries

By Caspar Greeff

Jacana Media (Pty) Ltd

Copyright © 2009 Caspar Greeff
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77009-761-2

Contents

Title Page,
Copyright Page,
Prologue,
1 – Dying for change,
2 – No good deed goes unpunished,
3 – The departure,
4 – Truth is stranger than fiction,
5 – Lifting the veil,
6 – The dark side,
7 – Stepping out the bubble,
8 – The flame of courage,
9 – The Temple of the Way of Light,
10 – A man of vision,
11 – The School of the Black Puma, Green Dragon,
12 – My destiny in a pocket,
13 – The ayahuasca blues,
14 – Even better than work,
15 – Terror attacks in America!,
16 – The future’s not set,
17 – One night in Shanghai,
18 – The eye of the storm,
19 – Yin and Yang,
20 – The compassionate Buddha guy speaks,
21 – Rescue 911,
22 – Che’s babe,
23 – The triangle of life,
24 – Route 48,
25 – Five doctors from five planets,
26 – Send in the clowns,
27 – A slight change of plan,
28 – The compassionate Buddha guy takes a break,
29 – The fable of the bushmaster,
30 – Rumble in the jungle,
31 – Things fall together,
32 – The 33rd maestro,
33 – Shakedown Street,
34 – Thwarted at every turn,
35 – If it’s Thursday this must be Venezuela,
36 – Hit the road, Jack,
37 – Enter the warrior,
38 – Let the ceremony begin,
39 – Inside a bamboo grove,
40 – Fire in the lake,
41 – A hummingbird in Bolivar Plaza,
42 – A star without equal,
43 – The Dragon’s Veins,
44 – The Demon of the White Bones,
45 – The final ritual,
46 – Crash-landing,
47 – After the fall,
48 – One more time,
49 – Gone fishin’,
50 – Time to split,
51 – The maestro of maestros,
52 – Ride it on baby,
53 – Back to the beginning,
54 – Gorilla warfare,
55 – The secret garden,
56 – An inelegant departure,
Bibliography,

CHAPTER 1

Dying for change

IT WAS GOING to be a long night. At least a few thousand years. No, make that several million years. A slice of eternity at any rate. But then time drags when you’re dead. And that’s what I was. Dead. In the realm of death, where every second is slow and hard and the Earth I had left was a paradise lost. Jesus, how I wished I could get back there.

Vivid colours bled and melted; geometric patterns of infinite complexity twirled and transformed into winged playing cards, disembodied vaginas, grinning skulls and smirking faces, and then became a grotesque carnival where freaks, skeletons and spectres pranced and strutted. ‘Roll up! Roll up! It’s the greatest show in the galaxy,’ cried a two-headed dwarf — one head Hitler, the other Mao Zedong — as a French infantryman in a blue-grey World War One uniform stuffed candyfloss into the gangrenous wound where his stomach had been. Behind him, a figure wearing the white robe and pointed hood of a Ku Klux Klansman hurled black billiard balls at a living pyramid of pink human foetuses. One of the foetuses was me, and I screamed silently, only to find myself in a place of ceaseless torment: a dim chamber from where peace had been banished. The wheels and gears of a huge machine clanked and ground relentlessly, wringing my soul dry of all past and future experience; wrenching out of me all my secrets and sins, desires and dreams, hopes and wishes; extracting everything I had ever thought, seen, heard, touched, tasted, smelt, sensed, said and done. An unseen entity demanded I surrender the password at the core of my being. It wanted total access to me.

My life unravelled. It was revealed in death’s all-seeing mirror as so much selfishness. No redeeming factors. I spun in a whirlpool of nausea. Darkness overpowered me. Dark forces, dark emotions. Terror, despair, regret, guilt. Confusion. Insanity. Being dead is no picnic.

Sparks flew and a bearded man wearing gumboots and a white robe appeared. He spat a cloud of perfume at me and a million flowers opened. The intoxicating aroma was the best thing I had experienced for millennia. The man puffed on the fat hand-rolled cigarette he was holding and blew smoke into my face. Wild jungle tobacco, Nicotiana rustica. The potent fumes revived me further, helped me ascend from the underworld. It felt as if an angel was healing me. I knew who he was. Scott Petersen. A shaman. I asked him a question.

‘Scott, am I dead?’

He looked at me, and the hint of a smile danced around his lips.

‘No Caspar, you haven’t died,’ he drawled softly. ‘I wouldn’t let that happen on my watch. But you are sweating a lot. Try to breathe deeply. Regard whatever happens to you with detached curiosity. You’ll be back to normal soon … the ayahuasca will wear off in a couple of hours.’

He walked away, flicking his cigarette lighter so that he could see in the profound darkness of the wooden temple.

I took slow, deep breaths; battled to adjust my consciousness. I heard an eerie chanting in an alien language. It was Scott’s assistant, Walter Martinez Guimoa: a short, dark Shipibo Indian shaman. He was singing the magic melodies called icaros, which are medicine in song form and incantations to the spirits.

Scott’s message penetrated my brain: ‘The ayahuasca will wear off in a couple of hours.’ Apparently I wasn’t dead and perhaps I hadn’t gone mad. I had drunk ayahuasca — the Vine of the Dead.

Ayahuasca is a potent psychoactive brew made by combining and boiling a jungle vine (Banisteriopsis caapi) and the leaves of a shrub (Psychotria viridis, also known as chacruna). Ayahuasca contains the alkaloid N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT), which is produced naturally — in minute doses — by the human body. The psychiatrist and author of DMT: The Spirit Molecule, Dr Rick Strassman, postulates that the pineal gland produces massive, psychedelic doses of DMT on certain occasions: 49 days after conception when the sex of the foetus becomes apparent; at birth; and at the moment of death. He theorises that the release of DMT on Day 49 marks the entrance of the human spirit into the foetus.

The ayahuasca will wear off in a couple of hours.

I stopped panicking and tuned into the noises of the night. A madre de luna bird cried forlornly for her daughter who, according to legend, had been transformed into the moon. Trillions of insects whirred like chattering stars in the black sky. A jazz ensemble of frogs got into some old-fashioned syncopation. A mosquito whined in Z-major. Enormous leaves thudded to the ground like falling murder victims brained with blunt objects. An owl investigating the homicides insistently asked: ‘Who? Who? Who?’ There was clicking, popping, rustling, crackling and munching: it sounded as if a distant herd of dinosaurs was on the move.

A coherent thought popped into my head: ‘I can’t believe you’ve paid to take this stuff another twenty times.’

But I had. I planned to take the frightening and, I believed, healing brew during the course of a month at Refugio Altiplano. After that I would travel through South America for another four months, drinking ayahuasca with shamans. This was beyond ecotourism, more than extreme tourism. It was, in fact, EEK!-otourism.

An enormous shimmering electric snake — Sachamama, guardian of the Amazon — opened its cavernous mouth in front of my face. ‘Maybe you are crazy,’ I thought as the serpent transformed into a grey-skinned alien with almond eyes. ‘What possessed you to do this?’

Was it the spirit of adventure? The call of the wild? Neither. More like a mid-life crisis. At the age of 48 I had lost the thread that had guided me through the labyrinth of existence. I had severed the sympathetic chord that once connected me to other humans, to nature and to my own spirit. I had abandoned my belief ‘like a hurt, lost and blinded fool’ and at times it seemed that death would be a merciful release, or at the very least a halfway decent option with no comebacks. I had contemplated suicide, but realised the act would leave my mother and father heartbroken and guilty, and out of compassion I would have to murder them before killing myself — but to do that would make my two sisters extremely unhappy, and I would have to end their lives as well, which would traumatise their children, whom I would then also have to kill on compassionate grounds, and I just didn’t have the energy to murder eight people so that I could commit suicide with good grace and a clean conscience. It’s like Hermann Hesse said in Steppenwolf:

You have often been sorely weary of your life. You were striving, were you not, for escape? You have a longing to forsake this world and its reality and to penetrate to a reality more native to you, to a world beyond time. You know, of course, where this other world lies hidden. It is the world of your own soul that you seek. Only within yourself exists that other reality for which you long. I can give you nothing that has not already its being within yourself. I can throw open to you no picture gallery but your own soul. All I can give to you is the opportunity, the impulse, the key. I can help make your own world visible. That is all.

To help make my own world visible I brought along my maker and co-creator. My prototype. My father. Caspar Senior. Full name: Casparus Johannes Boyd Greeff. Never know when I might need his help out here in the spooky spirit world. Not that Dad believes in spirits. He’s an empiricist who doesn’t believe that there’s anything beyond what can be ‘scientifically proven’. However, there is something of the Buddhist about him. He firmly believes in the First Noble Truth — that life is suffering — and he understands, as did Gautama Buddha, that in human life ‘old age and death, sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, and despair come into play.’

My father came along at my request because he owed me one — a couple of years ago he asked my sister and me to climb Mount Kilimanjaro with him, and we did. For a few minutes we had been the highest people in Africa (Uhuru Peak has an altitude of 19 340 feet.) Now we were high in a South American jungle.

I thought the jaunt in the jungle would be a good opportunity to make friends with my father. I imagined that jolts of jungle juice would alter his (dis)belief system; that he would realise there are many more dimensions to life than are apparent, that there’s more to it than entropy. At the very least, I figured he would find it an interesting experience.

I was wrong on most counts.

Dad has drunk ayahuasca three times since we’ve been here and he’s never going to drink it again.

‘The stuff’s poison,’ he said. ‘Pure poison.’ And he thinks that shamanism is mumbo jumbo; that shamans (Scott and Walter) are charlatans, and that while maybe, just maybe, the indigenous people here do believe in the existence of spirits, he certainly does not. ‘Show me a shaman and I’ll show you a show-man. I mean a sham-man,’ he proclaimed dryly.

The first time my father and I had drunk ayahuasca in the dark temple, where Walter sings icaros for four hours non-stop, Scott gave us each a small dose, and we didn’t cross the threshold that separates this realm from others. Dad brought his cynicism along to the ceremony, and after Scott donned his white robe, Dad whispered to me, ‘Is he going to put on his pointy hat now?’

During the second ceremony Dad saw ‘snakes slithering. At least they looked like snakes, they were certainly serpentine, but they didn’t have any heads.’

When you drink ayahuasca, the take-off is brutal, and you soon feel nauseous. The brew is known as la Purga — the Purge — because it makes you vomit, and after vomiting there’s a feeling of immense relief; and you go to the next stage. ‘That’s where it enters your heart chakra,’ Scott informed us. ‘That’s when you feel intensely sentimental feelings. Then you go to the third stage, where it opens your third eye, and you enter the spirit realm.’ (Dad absorbed this information with an attentive look on his face, but I know that inside he was grinning in disbelief. If he could have, he would have winked at the shaman with his third eye. )

Scott, who at the time was carrying a well-thumbed, black -covered copy of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, also told us that ayahuasca ‘cleanses you at the molecular level’; that it works its way through your stomach, your gall bladder, your liver, and your brain, repairing cellular damage, fixing damaged neurons, and healing all the way. ‘And it makes you intuitive, perceptive and telepathic,’ the bearded, blue-eyed shaman said. Or perhaps he just thought it.

Scott gave us a fairly large dose of ayahuasca at the start of the third ceremony. He told my father he should purge — vomit — because this would help him to assimilate the medicine. Then he extinguished the candles, and we were plunged into the darkness of the jungle night.

Black to the future.

We waited for the potion to kick in. After about 10 minutes, I felt the presence of an alien intelligence inside me: a curious entity slithering through my body, probing, investigating, exploring and repairing. A plant’s consciousness was overpowering my mind. Then there was nausea and I went to the realm of the dead where I became horribly stuck for a few thousand (or was it million?) years, overpowered by my fear, coping mechanisms and ego.

After Scott pulled me out of death’s smothering embrace I heard Dad breathing heavily, battling to free himself from the grip of the drug; attempting to give his body as much oxygen as possible to burn it up; trying at all costs not to vomit. I glanced in his direction and saw my father as I had never seen him before. He was a dark figure sitting bolt upright on the wooden bench, his grey beard was covered in merrily dancing blue flames and he was dandling a small winged monkey on his knee.

Walter’s singing faltered and stopped. The stocky, slant -eyed shaman stood up and I heard the rapid stride of his gumboots on the wooden floor. Then he vomited. For a long time. The more my Dad resisted vomiting, or so it seemed, the more Walter vomited. When he had finished vomiting, Walter strode back to his spot in the middle of the room, sat down again and resumed singing icaros. His voice was powerful — at times overpowering — and there were moments when Walter’s voice could take you to the darkest, ‘most demon-haunted bedrock of your being’.

After a million years the sky split asunder and an angry god hurled down a thunderbolt, Shiva destroyed a world. Waves of sound rolled across the jungle and echoed in the vault of my skull. It was the noise made by a shotgun fired by one of Scott’s sentries. A second shotgun blast followed. The two sentries fire their shotguns every night at midnight. ‘I’m not into the whole drama of South America,’ Scott had told me, ‘but if the people out there don’t know I’m armed and dangerous they’ll try and take everything I’ve got.’

Soon after the shotguns went off, Scott lit the candles and the ceremony was over.

We collected ourselves. My father said he felt ‘giddy’; that again he had seen brightly coloured, slithering, headless snakes, but that was all.

Scott walked us back to our bungalow. When we got there, Dad said ayahuasca was poison. ‘And I’m never going to take it again.’

‘But the Indians here have been using this stuff as medicine for thousands of years,’ I shot back. ‘They invented curare, for Christ sake; if they wanted to poison you they’d know exactly how to do it. Ayahuasca repairs neurological and cellular damage. It works its way through your system and heals you. Scott, tell my father.’

The shaman regarded my father with amusement. ‘You don’t buy into that shit, huh?’ Scott chuckled.

‘No I don’t,’ said Dad. ‘I was fine before I took the ayahuasca. Now I feel sick. There was nothing wrong with me. I don’t need this jungle juice. I’m healthy and content. I’m always healthy and content. At least I was before drinking this poison.’

After Scott left I went upstairs to my bed. I heard my poor father groaning in agony. I felt guilty about bringing him to the jungle to drink the Vine of the Dead. Why did I want to try and alter his belief system? It had served him adequately his whole life, what was the point in trying to change it?

My father was still groaning at about four in the morning, and I yelled to him from my upstairs bed: ‘Dad, are you alright?’

‘Ja, I’m fine thanks.’

‘Fine? Then why are you groaning like that?’

‘I feel a bit giddy, that’s all.’

I was annoyed that he refused to change his ways; that he thought this was all bullshit; that he hadn’t listened to the shaman and had resisted vomiting.

‘Well, why don’t you vomit, or drink some water or something? Jesus Dad, don’t torture yourself. Why didn’t you vomit during the ceremony? Scott said you should vomit and you didn’t listen to him. He didn’t want you to vomit so that you would feel humiliated or embarrassed, it was because it would have made you feel better. Scott knows what he’s doing, he’s taken ayahuasca 2 000 times.’

‘I’m fine.’

Fine. That was the word we used to hide our feelings. ‘I’m fine. My life’s fine. The world’s fine. Everything’s fine. Thank you.’

The next day Scott and I discussed Dad’s ordeal. ‘He’s 72,’ I said, ‘and I guess it would be terrifying for him to suddenly realise that everything he has believed for his entire life isn’t true.’

‘Yeah,’ said Scott. ‘Your dad’s set in his ways. He could have broken through, but it would have been gruelling for him. He might have reacted and recuperated, put himself together in a more receptive way. I think that what he assimilated was good for him, but I don’t think it would have been therapeutic to go too much further, because if he had, he would have had to capitulate by overcompensating and the pendulum would have swung back in the other direction.

(Continues…)Excerpted from The Ayahuasca Diaries by Caspar Greeff. Copyright © 2009 Caspar Greeff. Excerpted by permission of Jacana Media (Pty) Ltd.
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