Rak Razam - Aya Awakenings: A Shamanic Odyssey

Also by Rak Razam

The Ayahuasca Sessions: Conversations with
Amazonian Curanderos and Western Shamans

Electronic Edition: ISBN 978-1-58394-799-9

Copyright 2013 by Rak Razam. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief review, may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwisewithout the written permission of the publisher. For information contact North Atlantic Books.

Published by
North Atlantic Books
P.O. Box 12327
Berkeley, California 94712

Cover photo montage by Oli Dunlop and Vance Gellert
Aya Awakenings title logo by Tim Parish and Rak Razam
Interior design by Brad Greene

Aya Awakenings: A Shamanic Odyssey is sponsored by the Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences, a nonprofit educational corporation whose goals are to develop an educational and cross-cultural perspective linking various scientific, social, and artistic fields; to nurture a holistic view of arts, sciences, humanities, and healing; and to publish and distribute literature on the relationship of mind, body, and nature.

DISCLAIMER: The following information is intended for general information purposes only. The publisher does not advocate illegal activities but does believe in the right of individuals to have free access to information and ideas. Any application of the material set forth in the following pages is at the readers discretion and is his or her sole responsibility.

North Atlantic Books publications are available through most bookstores. For further information, visit our website at www.northatlanticbooks.com or call 800-733-3000.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
ISBN 978-1-58394-800-2

v3.1

For all those seeds the vine has touched
and for those yet to sprout

Our vision will become clear
Only when you look inside your heart
Who looks outside dreams
Who looks inside awakens
C. G. JUNG

1971 was a pivotal and transformative year in the evolving social and cultural lurch that has characterized the progress of the human species in the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond. Then, as now, the times were turbulent; the war in Vietnam raged on, protesters were in the streets, the counterculture probed ever more edgy avenues of personal self-expression; then, as now, the nation as well as the world was riven with terrorism and conflict; then, as now, gigantic tornadoes, massive earthquakes and snowstorms were the environmental news of the day; then, as now, the ongoing spectacle of human folly and foibles ground on, with most of the worlds people too distracted to notice or care about the fate of the planet or the meaning of human destiny.

1971 marked the real close of the 1960s, a crossing of a certain threshold that left society to sort out the consequences of the forces unleashed in that decade, a task with which we have been preoccupied ever since, and one far from finished. Among the many cultural, political, technological, and spiritual influences that surfaced in the sixties that continue to shape our collective worldview, onethe rediscovery of the psychedelic experience and its emergence in modern consciousnessis quite unlike anything that has happened before in human history.

The 1960s was the decade that psychedelics, largely in the form of LSD, erupted into modern society, and by 1971 the genie was thoroughly out of the bottle. I say rediscovery because of course there is nothing new about psychedelics; they have formed the foundations of indigenous shamanism worldwide for millennia; in modern times, perhaps the last 150 years, they have been curiosities attracting the interest

It was there that Wasson attended a mushroom velada, a vigil, with the curandera Maria Sabina, who subsequently became perhaps the most famous shaman of all time (to her regret). Wasson, on the other hand, became the first non-Indian to consume the sacred fungi in a ceremonial setting and was more than happy to make the most of it. His fantastic account of that magical night in a hut clinging to a Mexican mountainside was tinged with awe and wonder, like the tale of a long-lost traveler who has returned from lands beyond the edge of the known world; as indeed, Wasson had done. And there it was in LIFE magazine, with color photos and beautiful watercolor paintings of the several species of Oaxacan magic mushrooms; there it was, sitting on practically every coffee or kitchen table in sleepy 1950s America.

I was but a lad of six when that article was published; I could comprehend what it was about, within my limited reading skills at the time, but I didnt pay it much attention. Older brother Terence, who was ten at the time, paid it a lot of attention. In fact, he was so excited about it that I can remember one occasion when he followed our mother through the house, waving the magazine and demanding to know what it was all about! Well, if Terence was excited about it, I figured, it must be cool (to a six-year old, anything your ten-year-old brother does is cool, by definition) so I took an interest too. Thus began an obsession, or at least a passionate interest, that has consumed both of our lives.

And like a nanomolecular virus plopped into the quiet pond of Meme, the ripples generated by that article were the catalyst that initiated the change in mass consciousness with respect to psychedelics. All subsequent events, from the rise of Leary to the eventual banning of LSD and ultimately all psychedelics (many in the UN Convention on Psychotropic Substances signed in Vienna in 1971) can be linked to that single publication. It brought psychedelics front and center for a brief time, and the American imagination, and fascination with the exotic and bizarre, kept it there for over a decade. The armies of hippies that descended on the tiny village of Huautla de Jimnez in the latter sixties in search of Wassons treasure became the first, but not the last, instance of psychedelic tourism.

Flash forward to 1971. Terence was hiding out from Interpol in Vancouver, while I was a second-year undergrad at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Though immersed in the political and countercultural ferment of our times, our time on the barricades was limited. We were instead preoccupied with DMT, a rare and almost legendary psychedelic that occasionally surfaced in the underground. The sloppy bathtub syntheses that came our way were anything but pure, but they did the job. We had become utterly convinced that in this substance, and perhaps only in it, lay the salvation of humanity and perhaps the key that could unlock portals to other dimensions. So when we stumbled across a paper by R. E. Schultes, the famous Harvard ethnobotanist, about an obscure DMT-based hallucinogen used by the Witoto people of the upper Amazon, we knew we had to go after it.

We departed on our quest in late January 1971, determined to uncover a secret that would change us, and everything, forever. The secret we uncovered was something far stranger than the one we had set out to find; and it did change everything, though not in the ways we had envisioned.

Thus, unwittingly, Terence and I enscribed the first lines of a script that would play out over the next forty years in our own lives and in the culture at large. Those familiar with our myth have already heard the story of our misadventures at the mission village of La Chorrera in the Colombian Amazon in February and March of 1971.a graduate student in ethnobotany I returned to the Amazon, to Peru, to carry out fieldwork on ayahuasca and