When I knew that the spirits were attendant, I went to the river to speak with the medicine. Other travelers and drifters were there, sitting in their own fields of private contemplation. I pass the idle hearths and find a place where I can listen to the messages in the wind. Branches above sweep away the confusions of the mountain contours, my journey is inward this time. Wachuma and Pachamama speak to me, they say things that I only half-understand, probably less so than I realize. It will take a lifetime to understand.
Wachuma insisted: "There is no creative process. There is no creative process.” And when I respond with patience, humbling myself to the eternal march of the river and the windswept rays of sunlight that fell from the heavens, Wachuma rewards me with another detail: "The same process that cleans dishes with your hands also produces masterpieces of art and human ingenuity."
Thoughts come at random, chaotic, circular, as they always do. I let them be, and there is one that begins to itch. I think about my place in the world, I wonder whether I am in the right location to unleash my productivity, to realize my dreams, to be fulfilled in life. The thought is twisted in emotions of anxiety, it won't let up. Wachuma demands attention:
"You'll never find ‘it', you'll never arrive at ‘the' spot, but there's always a spot."
I understand that I have the ability to find fulfillment here, in this locale. I have all the tools that I need. Am I so sure that I know what I want? I imagine an acquaintance from the homeland who is always ambivalent about what they want in life. I can hear a guru speaking with them. The person says to the guru, “I don’t know what I want.”
The guru responds, “Why don’t you know what you want?”
And of course, this fearful person returns “I don’t know why I don’t know what I want!”
Unperturbed, the guru responds, "Good, we have entered a better conversation. Now we can find better questions. Why do you not know why you don't know what you want?”
At this point, confused and self-defeated, the acquaintance of my past disintegrates, and the guru is Wachuma, speaking to me. Unlike the defeated one that came before, I want to understand, I wish to transform myself. And Wachuma speaks through me with a response that rings with our agreement:
"I know I'm not living enough when I have nothing that demands to be written about."
"Why am I really going to Medellin?” The wind answers with a sigh. Clouds dissipate, I’m probably getting burned by those rays. Maybe that is the answer — no reason at all. I need a better question. I’ve found a medium by which to receive the answers that I long for, but can I stop identifying with the world long enough to channel an answer?
"I wish I knew nothing,” I say in the voice of an old philosopher, "but nothing cannot be known!”
"I find it most unfortunate that I still know something.” Says someone. Perhaps it was me because the philosopher’s quip had made more sense.
To myself: "What is that something that you wish to replace with nothing?”
"Life is a question and the answer,” Wachuma responds before I can speak. And I realize that I am feeling the questions, not articulating them. But the answers are arriving in words. And I think that I might want to replace doubt with nothing if that is the most stable positive outcome.
The spirit had asked many questions, which I had felt but not accepted. Wachuma can peer through your walls of lead, It looks through your ego and laughs with God who grins back, it knows me, it knows my truth. After all of those questions, the spirit could see that I am lonely and that I fear intimacy. It asks through me, “What do I need to accept in order to trust in and love people?”
“You must know people’s language to understand them, but communication is not only linguistic. The way people communicate is a window into the soul of their culture, and to bridge the gap of communication is an invitation.” I smoke mapacho enhanced by marijuana, it tastes like cacao. The spirits move into me through the roots of the trees, my solar plexus is vibrating, all of me is vibrating.
"Everyone struggles with living smaller than life,” Wachuma transcribes, my phone is a glowing mirage as I plug the warm notes into that orange plasma soup screen. “But as soon as you learn to let go of your scope, you will become so enormous that you can no longer distinguish the world's breath from your own.”
Thinking in response: This is what I mean when I speak of the self. Not the ego-self, which is merely a function within the body, but rather the Self of selves. I cannot grasp it, and the medicine electrifies my gut with a question: “Did the Self become selves in order to know itself?"
"An itch cannot scratch itself, but it can itch so enormously that it blooms into something else entirely.” It is a gorgeous day when Wachuma shares its wisdom, and I feel euphoric confidence and dilated time, and the space around me announces itself more evidently than the space that came before it. Boots are off, glasses aren’t of much use either. The sun burns, I stare into the black hearth, then to the shining stones of the river. Absolute, yet always transforming, this mountain, this water.
Without words, without knowing, I ask the question: “What do I need in order to be consistently energized and inspired, and what will restore me as I grind myself down?”
"What else is inspiration but the perspiration of the Earth into your heart?” And I felt the Earth tremble within me. I hummed, then sang in a tongue not my own, at least not this particular iteration of me. A healing song, vehicle to spirits. At that moment, I was actually wishing for permission to be inspired, to be prosperous in life. I was thinking of my good luck thus far, my healthy position in society. I wanted permission to have that, and I couldn’t give it to myself. Now the Earth was sharing itself with me entirely. I don’t know how to accept such a gift.
Pachamama says: "Generosity is about true ownership; you cannot truly own something until you can give it away.” Her wisdom had come to me from a book in the jungle, an alchemist’s guide to Christ, and perhaps it was Christ who first said those words. It was a message that had traveled far, through countless mediums. I cover my face and lay in the clover and stumps, I think of my journey, those who I have related to, the others who I have evaded. Today I know that they are like reflections in a mirror, and I am also a reflection of the rest of the world. But my false identifications run deep, the channels of my mind are smoothed and allow for doubt to rush in. I ask a question with two opposing answers, I hear “Yes; No” as the query finds my journal:
"Do I truly own myself yet?” Burning through a final match and bringing it to the mapacho, I listen to Wachuma’s response.
"Self-ownership is often mistakenly conflated with selfishness or egotism. They are not the same thing. You also cannot truly give something up until you have taken true ownership of it.” The medicine reveals visions of armies, the ruin of war and famine, and dictatorships behind many layers of towering concrete walls and barbed wire. "When a people collectively fail to take ownership of themselves, the ego may be externalized, it is put inside a high castle and given reign over the hearts of the people, and from there it is bestowed enormous power, the ego possesses the soul of its captive population. Unprepared to give themselves away, they have instead become imprisoned by passing the buck of responsibility. In their struggle to preserve themselves, they have lost that which was most important.”
The imagery of all that suffering lingers, I think that I don't want to be an oppressor, and I also don't wish to be oppressed. If the world is prepared to bestow so much freedom and prosperity to me, how do I avoid the traps of history?
"Ownership does not require possession. There are people who are prosperous but not wealthy, they may have nothing beyond a few humble possessions, but they have given so much that they are true owners of their lives. You can have something without owning it; There are wealthy people who do not truly own themselves, and without that, they cannot truly own their possessions. These same people may have become wealthy only after taking from others, but true ownership cannot be obtained through theft. It must be mutually given away, like true love. This is how one can be prosperous without attaining wealth, this is how one may own themselves and the entire world, without possession or theft. In a familiar word, it is acceptance, humble and compassionate acceptance. All of the oppression in the world may be healed through self-ownership.”
I tell the spirits that I am listening, but I am uncertain of myself. I’ve been given so much, and I want to build on it and give that away, but I fear that the world will not accept what I offer to it. It will reject me, and it will not support me. I fear that my efforts will quickly wither, and I’ll end up resigning to self-preservation and return to a life that I had before, one that felt so much less fulfilling and required a great deal of effort to overcome.
Wachuma shows me gurus who are not gurus. Those who behave like the wind, but cannot hear its voice. People with weak convictions and poor intentions. And the spirit urges me to see their faces, to acknowledge that they are human, like me, and we are all flawed. The medicine reaches for my journal, "Your actions are your appearance, in the end, no one can see anything else but that. You wear it like a colorful, obvious robe your entire life."
“What does my robe look like now?” I ask three weeks later.
“You wear your family, but you are not your family's projections. You wear society, but you are not society's projections. Look beneath the robe, you must begin by being vulnerable with yourself; you are a projection of God, so lighten your robe."
I feel like I am asking the same questions as before, but the medicine is patient. “I don’t want the world to see my shadow.”
"We give everything of ourselves to the world regardless of whether we or the world is prepared to receive it. The world is always receiving you. You must own your actions as well as the consequences, your faults as well as your strengths because they feed into one another."
I’ve had these conversations before, it is certain. And from that place above myself, I say "Wisdom feels like remembering."
By this time, the world remained in a stable state, but I continue to feel euphoric. The smell of freshly felled eucalyptus fills the valley with a sweet aroma, I roll their fallen seeds between my fingers, fascinated with the star that formed on the underside. I am grateful for the nature around me, but a part of me always calls out for something that will absolutely shock and displace me. “If you feel that this is normal and you are settled in this place,” the medicine whispers. “Know that this silence is the world revealing it's true face to you. You have discovered trust at its source."
It occurred to me that had a person of the town come by at that moment, they would see a grinning foreigner chatting with himself, or perhaps with the trees. "Of course I talk to myself,” I respond to them. “Who else would I be talking to?”
I return to the hostel and visit my room for a moment. Above me, the lightbulb against the background of a white ceiling becomes a sloth with a dolphin’s nose. In a goofy voice, it tells me that no matter what I think or do, it will always remain a silly lightbulb. I regard it with a smile and lift my phone. It is hot with energy, I cannot distinguish the heat from that of the mechanisms inside the machine, and those which burn in me. This thing really is a part of me after all. The text glows with a red aura as if it was floating above the screen rather than inside it. And that made me think of a hard problem: “How do you put a soul into a machine?”
“There are no machines. It is only language leveraging itself in new ways, different combinations, a living language of the world.”
Brainstorming, I try to imagine the exact language required to make the best decisions based on less information, rather than too much of it. With the right decisions, we can curate our lives in such a way that future decisions only build traction towards our true desire. "How can I help people obtain what they most truly desire amongst an unending stream of abundance in options and information? I can hardly understand how to do that for myself. What do we all really want?"
The sloth-dolphin becomes sinister, eyes like Pennywise, and it gladly adopts my sins for me. It pulls them out of me, my shame, an amorphous and toxic emotion of unworthiness. The sloth-dolphin feeds on that emotion, its eyes turned out in extreme strabismus. Uncertain about this spirit’s intentions, I walk to the field just outside.
I stretch and meditate while the mountains and the citadel reveal a golden aura that spans for miles, though the majority of the medicine’s magic remains internal. My intention on this day was to answer a question: What must I do in the present moment to most appropriately move forward on the path of self-fulfillment, of replacing doubt with trust? And the spirits had answered. In time, I finally received answers to my previous questions, which may have been condensed into “How must I hone my truest vision and manifest that vision into reality?”
---
"Your audience finds you, with you.” The medicine had said. It is days later now, and I have continuously begun to cross paths with people who guide me to the next element of my truest vision. I decided to extend my visa and remain in Peru for at least a couple more months. That decision tilted my fortune, and it was just as the medicine told me:
"People will tell you what they really want with their heart, that is why it is so difficult to build relationships by throwing money at them. You are throwing grass at a cow.”
“Replace doubt with trust,” I tell Gaia. It has been six years since I met her in Karnataka, and back then she was younger than me, naive, and had only just begun her apprenticeship as a tattooist. Now as fate would have it, I meet her again, the woman with the namesake of the goddess that I’d met in that field two weeks earlier, and we are in a different mountain town on the other side of the world from our first encounter. She’s matured, older than me by several years, and confident.
“That is a good prayer, you will write it on paper and leave it on your altar until the tattoo is complete, then you can bury it with some coca leaves and cacao seeds beneath the passion flowers.” She hands me a beautiful quartz crystal, “Set your intention into this, and I will attach the needle to it."
I wrote a spell to enchant my first tattoo, and repeated the words infinitely into the crystal vehicle:
Replace doubt with trust,
fear with faith,
frustration with honesty,
ambivalence with conviction,
to cultivate self-respect.
As the pain of the needle opens up my arm to conviction, Wachuma speaks into the burn: “Understand and accept that sometimes what you have arrived at is enough, it is exactly what you are looking for."
I am in great pain for the first half-hour, Apu Linli as a witness through the open window. Gaia dips the needle into the ink that sits on an altar that is actually a familiar book, The Power of Now, an unopened copy to charge today’s ceremony. From Gaia's stereo begins íde wéde wéde, and I chant the medicine song with my cohort from the jungle, it is as if they are still with me. The tattoo is in the image of the Custodians who revealed themselves to me in the ayahuasca sessions. I will forever have this imprint of the Custodians on my body, and it will always remind me of my conviction of trust, self-respect, and of the demons who had now become protectors; they will always have a seat at the high table. In time, the pain is swallowed by endorphins and adrenaline, and I feel as though I am in a trance. When Gaia lays the quartz aside, I stand and face Apu Linli. Gaia was here in the same hostel and the same day. There are no coincidences, only arrival. We are always arriving; through our convictions, we manifest the world.
In the lobby of the hostel, I practice the flute while our Romanian friend retells her own story of the journey with Wachuma. Jorges, Lili, and Yani listen patiently. “It was too much, I didn’t need all of that! Nobody needs that, we are not designed for it, our heads will explode!”
I ask, “Now that you’ve had that experience, what will you do with it?”
“Relax, take it easy. Life does not have to be complicated, so I will live simply.”
“That’s good,” I say. Good, we have entered a better conversation. Now we can ask better questions. The spirit had said that to me, but did this woman receive a similar message? She repeats her denouncements another dozen times before I interrupt, “It sounds like you went very deep with the medicine. Past lives, time travel, that’s incredible. For me, the experience was mostly internal this time, and I think that the medicine shows you exactly what you need. I wanted a conversation, and it gave me that. When I returned to my room in the evening, there was a note that I forgot I’d written, it had my intention written on it. I’d asked what I needed to do now, what was best? And it told me, ‘open your door’. So that was it, be more vulnerable with people, don’t be afraid to be with them.”
I don’t know if they understood me, but I was happy to spend that time with them. People will find you, with you.