The jungle Prescription – Film Trailer from The Ayahuasca Project on Vimeo.

Premiering tonight in Canada on CBC’s The Nature of Things, (8pm EST, November 10, 2011) The Jungle Prescription tells of ayahuasca, the visionary Amazonian brew of indigenous origin and its encounter with the West, as played out through the story of two doctors. The first, Dr. J. Mabit, runs a legendary detox centre deep in the Peruvian jungle, in partnership with indigenous healers. The second, Dr. Gabor Maté, is risking his reputation trying to establish a similar program in Canada. Through the intimate stories of these doctors and their patients, we see how an ancient medicine causes cathartic, life-changing insight, and we witness the commitment of people who have devoted their whole lives to applying this medicinal knowledge.

As anticipation for the documentary grows, so has media attention. In particular, Dr. Gabor Maté has recently appeared in major Canadian media, such as CBC News, The Globe and Mail, The Star, and the popular CBC Radio program “The Current”, speaking eloquently, with calm, poignant passion about his work and experience with ayahuasca and addiction. Subsequent to media attention, Dr. Gabor Maté has since garnered the attention of  Health Canada, who have ordered Maté to stop treating addicts with ayahuasca.

When ayahuasca appears on mainstream television, especially a program as storied and respected as The Nature of Things, which debuted on CBC on November 6, 1960, and has been hosted by David Suzuki since 1979, there is often required a double-take, a closer look, perhaps a strange and uncomfortable fascination. Something akin to seeing your grandparents on Facebook.

However, in this case, The Ayahuasca Project; the documentary film; the entire situation – from the sweeping support and excitement of those familiar with ayahuasca, to the healthy intrigue and questions of those who may not be familiar, to significant mainstream media attention, and government involvement – has gently, with calm purpose opened and advanced the discussion and awareness of ayahuasca – in a broad context, to wide and diverse groups of people – with, importantly – utmost respect to the plant, the traditions surrounding it, and significantly, with great respect and care for the people who come, or may come, to drink ayahuasca.

Clearly there exists now the opportunity to build numerous bridges across old, deep and dark chasms, across worlds, perceptions and presumptions, beyond barriers both legal and cultural, even, perhaps, beyond belief  and beyond words to places, as Dr. Gabor Maté has described, that “enliven and invigorate our natural healing capacity”, as individuals, as communities, as nations, as a planet.

The very first Evolver Intensive was hosted by Jeremy Narby, and it set a serious precedent. Hundreds of people gathering together online, via webcams to discuss and explore Ayahuasca with some of the most well respected visionaries of our age.

Now it is time for another round, as there are endless avenues, paths and canopies to explore on the subject.

These sessions are intimate, interactive, exciting, engaging and, I dare say, uplifting. Ayahuasca.com is an enthusiastic sponsor of this event and we hope you will join us, along with Jeremy Narby, and guests Steve Beyer, Benny Shanon, Kenneth Tupper, Susana Bustos, and Martina Hoffmann to explore how Ayahuasca is transforming the lives of people around the world, challenging Western notions about healing, art, religion, and the intelligence of nature.

Registration for the course is $129

Not long ago, the vine of the soul, ayahuasca, was virtually unknown outside the Amazon region. Today it attracts the attention of legions of Western seekers drawn to the prospect of deep wisdom available through indigenous shamanic practices that involve the use of psychedelic plants. Ayahuasca is revered by ancient tribal societies as a potent teacher capable of healing the body, expanding the mind, and strengthening community.

• What can modern people can learn from indigenous cultures about the use of ayahuasca as part of a healing practice?
• What can be learned directly from the spirit vine — which can be a powerful and tricky teacher — and how can we incorporate these lessons into our daily lives?
• In what ways do indigenous people benefit from the Western interest in shamanism, and what new cultural bridges are being built through the spread of indigenous spiritual practices?

The renowned anthropologist Jeremy Narby has explored these questions for over two decades. In his much-admired books, including The Cosmic Serpent and Shamans Through Time, Jeremy has shared his wisdom and insights. Last winter, Jeremy hosted his first Evolver Intensives course, Awakening the Cosmic Serpent: Shamanism and Plant Teachers in this Transformative Time, which offered a rare opportunity to explore the nuances of plant medicine with some of the world’s leading visionary thinkers on the subject.

As participants in that course will attest, Jeremy is a remarkable teacher. If you missed that course, here is your chance to take part in a special online event, watching the live video stream and asking your questions directly to inspirational pioneers. If you were there, you won’t want to miss the continued exploration of topics charted in the first course, as Jeremy leads in-depth discussions with 5 exciting new guests: Steve Beyer, Benny Shanon, Kenneth Tupper, Susana Bustos, and Martina Hoffmann.

This course gives you the tools you need to integrate the shamanic knowledge offered by ayahuasca into your life, so you can fully embrace the change called for by this time of global transformation.

• Learn how plant teachers teach their own secrets, such as how to sing to them and how use them
• Explore how well shamans actually cure sickness
• Discuss the predatory and ambiguous nature of ayahuasca shamanism
• Learn the categories of visions that people have
• Discover whether drinkers of the brew gain access to specific factual information
• Review the influence of ayahuasca on contemporary visionary art
• Explore ayahuasca’s recent transnational expansion, and why it remained obscure for most Euroamericans until the last part of the 20th century?

This course takes place on 5 Sundays, between October 9 and November 6 and you can participate from your laptop anywhere in the world with a broadband connection. If you can watch a YouTube video, you can take part in this course.

Each seminar is devoted to one-on-one conversations between Jeremy and a featured guest, followed by a Q & A session in which you can take part. This will be a live, dynamic experience in which you become part of a community of students sharing real time with some of the most inspiring visionaries of our era.

Steve Beyer

Benny Shannon

Kenneth Tupper

Susana Bustos

Martina Hoffmann

ABOUT OUR HOST

The bodies of Amazon rainforest activist Joao Claudio Ribeiro da Silva and his wife Maria do Espirito Santo are carried to burial by friends and relatives, in the municipal cemetery of Maraba, in Brazil, on May 26, 2011. The identity of those responsible for the shooting in northern Brazil on Tuesday has not yet been determined, but da Silva predicted his own death six months ago, and was the recipient of frequent death threats by illegal loggers and cattle ranchers.

“I will protect the forest at all costs. That is why I could get a bullet in my head at any moment — because I denounce the loggers and charcoal producers,” he said.

Watch his speech at TEDxAmazonia, below, in which he says he believes killing trees in the rainforest is murder (click the “cc” button in the player for English subtitles).

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The murders of da Silva and his wife took place as Brazil’s Congress debates a divisive bill that threatens to further expand deforestation. Da Silva and Espirito Santo were active in the same organization of forest workers that was founded by legendary conservationist Chico Mendes. Al Jazeera has a video report here, and a first-person account from the funeral for the slain activist here.

More news coverage: NPR, New York Times, Guardian, Reuters, Telegraph.

Photos above and below: Reuters

Via BoingBoing

Gone, yet unforgettable. Ever-present, like an iridescent and laughing lighthouse on the shifting sea of consciousness, concrescence and evolution; Terence McKenna. Right there behind your eyelids. The man, the myth, the legend. The storyteller. The spellbinding spelunker of time and mind who, in his life, in his work and even in death, articulates and expands – courageously and exceptionally – the spirit of the 60′s, 70′s, 80′s, 90′s, the turn-of-the-century, 2012, and beyond.

Across the beckoning abyss and shifting sands, The Brothers McKenna walked far afield, through the wheat and the chaff, armed to the teeth with mighty wit, puns, punchlines, science, philosophy, curiosity, alchemy, obscurity, antiquity, novelty and levity. Now, as we collectively surf and waver along the cracking boundaries of folly or clarity, Terence grows increasingly relevant; a natural resource of epigrams and epiphanies, clues and critique, manifestos and magic, mathematics and inspiration.

New chapters emerge; Dennis has determined that the time has come to tell his side of the story, and is proposing to write a book, The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss; the title is in recognition of the name the two brothers and their intrepid band of fellow adventurers chose for themselves, partly tongue in cheek, and partly – mostly, as they discovered – deadly serious. Dennis is using Kickstarter.com to garner the resources, and time, needed to write this work, which will be both a memoir of sorts but also a fresh examination of the revelations forced onto them at the climax of that heart-of-darkness journey. Those who may be interested can find a detailed description of this proposal on the Kickstarter web site.

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Join host Dennis McKenna and some of his and Terence’s closest friends for this for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to chew the fat, chat anew and draw fresh water from the McKenna wellspring in this exciting Evolver Intensive.

Evolver Intensives are exhilarating, engaging, interactive, intimate and eye-opening online video gatherings that exude what Terence described as “the felt presence of immediate experience”. You are there; across timezones, timewaves, and (invisible) landscapes; cozy, connected and tuned in, with everyone.

The course begins on June 5 and runs four consecutive Sundays at 3pm EST.

Registration is $110, and includes:

• Four 90-minute live video seminars with Dennis McKenna and featured guests
• 30 minutes of question-and-answer time in each seminar
• Breakout sessions for student discussion following each seminar
• Participation in a private online community with other students
• Unlimited online access to videos of all seminars
• PDF articles about course topics from Dennis and each of the guests

Gather your friends and family together, share the cost and make it a weekly event.

Click here for further information and to register.

Ayahuasca.com is an enthusiastic sponsor of this event. Your participation helps keep the project flying strong.

If you have any questions, concerns or comments please join the conversation here, in the forums.

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Using live video, each webinar session will be hosted by Dennis McKenna in wide-ranging conversations with key guests who are recognized leaders on the cutting edge of post-millennial thought: Daniel Pinchbeck, Ralph Abraham, Marc Pesce, Ralph Metzner, Luis Eduardo Luna and Erik Davis.

Most have also been close personal friends of Terence and Dennis over many decades; they have shared Terence and Dennis’ fascination and preoccupations with the concepts under discussion and have been key players in the development, elaboration, and expression of these ideas.  Like Terence and Dennis, they lived through the social, environmental, and political changes that have characterized our ever-accelerating race toward novelty during the late 20^th century and the first decade of the 21^st; in many respects, they are the people who have helped to catalyze the radical changes in global consciousness that have resulted.

Each webinar will be 90 minutes in length, with the first 60 minutes devoted to a dialog between Dennis, the host, and one or more invited guests.  The format will be an informal discussion, preceded by a brief exposition outlining the main themes under consideration in that session. There will be ample opportunities for the audience to interact in real time with the host and guests following the hour-long conversation. Participants from the audience will be able to ask questions and offer their own comments and insights via live video chat, text, or email.  If you can watch a YouTube video, you can take part in this course.

FEATURED GUESTS

Daniel Pinchbeck

Sunday, June 5, 3:00 p.m. EST

Dr. Luis Eduardo Luna

Sunday, June 12, 3:00 p.m. EST

Ralph Abraham

Saturday, June 25, 3:00 p.m. EST

Mark Pesce

Saturday, June 25, 3:00 p.m. EST

Erik Davis

Saturday, July 2nd, 3:00 P.M., EST

Ralph Metzner

Saturday, July 2nd, 3:00 p.m.

ABOUT OUR HOST

Dennis McKenna is a ethnopharmacologist focusing on the therapeutic uses of psychoactive medicines derived from nature and used in indigenous ethnomedical practices. He is well known for his work with his brother Terence McKenna and their ground breaking research in The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching, and is co-founder of the Hefter Research Institute that promotes scientific research on hallucinogenic compounds.

These days are intense. No question. Depending on your perspective, things are moving with astonishing speed and clarity, or painfully slow, and saddening. We need to act fast. We need to shed our skins, and redesign. We need to do this together.

Come along with Starhawk, Van Jones, Vandana Shiva, Toby Hemenway, Ernest Callenbach, Carolyn Stayton and Mark Lakeman on four consecutive Wednesdays, from March 30 through April 20 at 9:00 p.m. EST, to dive deeply, intimately and comprehensively into How To Redesign The World: Lessons From The Fifth Sacred Thing.

Evolver Intensives are, well, intense.

Video calling and conferencing has become the norm, via Skype and so forth, but these sessions – these feel different. It’s quite an experience to gather together with a large and diverse group of people from around the planet, see each other, interact, chat, and sit comfortably with respected visionaries, luminaries and elders; sharing stories, experiences, wisdom, designs and energy openly, intimately, eloquently.

If you’ve participated in the previous session; Awakening The Cosmic Serpent, you know what I’m talking about; it’s a global campfire, and it’s warm and friendly.

Where Awakening the Cosmic Serpent explored worlds beyond, How To Redesign The World, takes things in another direction – down to earth, ground level, grassroots.

If you’re drawn towards peace, practical solutions, permaculture, transition towns, economics and ecology, community, regeneration, balance, and vision – then let’s go.

The course begins March 30 and runs four consecutive Wednesdays at 9:00 PM EST.

Registration is $110, and includes:

• Four 90-minute live video seminars with Starhawk and featured guests
• 30 minutes of question-and-answer time in each seminar
• Breakout sessions for student discussion following each seminar
• Participation in a private online community with other students
• Unlimited online access to videos of all seminars
• PDF articles about course topics from Starhawk and each of the guests

Gather your friends, family and neighbours together, share the cost and make it a weekly event!

Overview:

Without a clear vision of the future, how can we move forward? A vision crystallizes vague hope into concrete direction.

• What would it look like, feel like to live in harmony with nature? To live in a world that celebrates diversity, where art, joy, love and compassion take precedence over war and weapons? How would we grow our food, produce what we need, educate the young and care for the old?
• How can we turn this vision of the future into the mission that guides our lives today, so it can shape the world of tomorrow?
• What forward-looking efforts now exist to inform and nurture the growth of your vision?

In her utopian novel, The Fifth Sacred Thing, Starhawk offers a vision of a green, multicultural society based on reverence for the four sacred things, a vision that has inspired countless readers, and has changed lives. In the novel, northern California has survived ecological and social catastrophes to become a place where no one goes hungry or homeless, streams flow through former streets, gardens are everywhere, and the culture has the strength and fortitude to resist invasion without turning to violence.

As we head into times of great chaos and potential destruction, we need a vision of a positive future. In this course, Starhawk will train us in some of the basic tools of magic, “the art of changing consciousness at will”: meditation, visualization and grounding. We’ll then use those tools to generate our own vision.

For over three decades, Starhawk has been one of our most respected and influential visionaries, leading the revival of earth-based spirituality and Goddess religion. In her work as an eco and peace organizer, she has trained thousands of activists in the skills necessary for effecting real change consistent with their deepest held convictions. As a prize-winning author or co-author of 11 books, her voice has been instrumental in shaping the ecological consciousness many of us share today.

Join Starhawk as she takes part in intimate, in-depth discussions with five fellow pioneers who are helping to move us into the future we want to see: Van Jones, Vandana Shiva, Toby Hemenway, Ernest Callenbach, Mark Lakeman, and Carolyn Stayton. In her talks with these remarkable thinkers, writers and activists, she’ll explore some of the most inspiring efforts to create the diverse, sustainable, exuberant society depicted in The Fifth Sacred Thing. For the course, Starhawk will also suggest discussion topics, exercises and journaling for participants to develop their own clear visions and map the path for getting there. Participants will come away from this course with renewed inspiration and practical ideas for making the transition to a truly abundant, just and resilient world.

You will be part of this unique online event, watching the live video stream and asking your questions directly to these inspirational pioneers.

Starhawk For over three decades, Starhawk has been one of our most respected and influential visionaries, leading the revival of earth-based spirituality and Goddess religion. In her work as an eco and peace organizer, she has trained thousands of activists in the skills necessary for effecting real change consistent with their deepest held convictions. As a prize-winning author or co-author of 11 books, her voice has been instrumental in shaping the ecological consciousness many of us share today.

Vandana Shiva In her many roles as environmentalist, physicist, feminist and philosopher, Vandana has been a powerful voice of deep conviction, grounded in solid research. Her ability to combine intellectual study with grassroots activism in the fields of eco-feminism, bio-piracy and intellectual property rights has won her many international awards, including the Right Livelihood Award (the Alternative Nobel Prize), the Earth Day International Award, and the Global 500 Award.

In 1984, Vandana founded Navdanya, an organization which helps India’s small farmers to develop organic farming methods and ensure biodiversity. Following on the success of Navdanya, she started Bija Vidyapeeth in Dehradun, India, to popularize holistic living practices.

Van Jones Globally recognized, award-winning pioneer in human rights and the clean-energy economy, the co-founder of three successful non-profit organizations: the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Color of Change, and Green For All. Author of the definitive, best-selling book on green jobs, The Green-Collar Economy, Van served as the green jobs advisor in the Obama White House in 2009.

Carolyne Stayton Executive Director of Transition US, Carolyne, brings over thirty years of experience with nonprofit organizations and educational institutions to the growth of a grassroots network that aligns community activists around a shared vision and a unified mission. Carolyn will talk about the movement to organize in our towns and neighborhoods for a graceful transition to a society that uses less fossil fuel energy but has more time for relationships, connection and real abundance.

Mark Lakeman In the last decade he has directed or facilitated designs for more than 300 new community-generated public places in Portland, Oregon alone. Through his leadership in Communitecture, Inc., and its nonprofit affiliate, The City Repair Project, he has also been instrumental in the development of dozens of participatory design projects and organizations across the United States and Canada. Mark works with governmental leaders, community organizations, and educational institutions in many diverse communities.

Toby Hemenway Author of the classic introduction to permaculture, Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, which for the last seven years has been the best-selling permaculture book in the world.

Ernest Callenbach Author of the utopian novel Ecotopia, one of the inspirations for The Fifth Sacred Thing and an environmental classic that has sold almost a million copies.

Click here for further information and to register.

Ayahuasca.com is an enthusiastic sponsor of this event. Your participation helps support the site.

If you have any questions, concerns or comments please join the conversation here, in the forums.

It is a very, very wild era;  increasing numbers of people around the world are engaging shamanism and sacred plants—potent teachers capable of healing the body, expanding consciousness, and strengthening community.

However, these plants, plant teachers, shamanic practices and spirit worlds can be a difficult landscape to navigate. There is much to learn. It is not easy.

Join host Jeremy Narby for a groundbreaking series of live online lectures, and one-on-one discussions with four of the world’s leading experts on the shamanic use of plants:  Wade Davis, Kat Harrison, Stanislav Grof, and Luis Eduardo Luna.

The course is a unique, rare and exciting opportunity to learn from, and engage in discussion with these well respected elders.

For the course, Jeremy will give two lectures, and also conduct four one-to-one discussions with guests Stan Grof, Wade Davis, Kat Harrison, and Luis Eduardo Luna. All this takes place using a real-time, interactive video technology easily accessible to anyone with a laptop and a broadband connection. If you can see YouTube videos, you can take part in an Evolver Intensives seminar.

Ayahuasca.com is a enthusiastic supporter and sponsor of this event. We sincerely hope you will join us, in the midst of this wild, wild era, to discuss, listen, learn, explore, discover and dive deep with Jeremy and these magnificent plant people.

Register Now. The course begins on January 23 and runs on six consecutive Sundays at 3pm EST.

Early Bird discounts are available until January 10.

You can watch Jeremy Narby’s video introduction to the course by clicking here.

If you have any questions, concerns or comments please join the conversation here, in the forums.

What can modern people can learn from indigenous cultures about the use of psychoactive plants and the modification of consciousness?

What can be learned directly from these plants — which can be powerful and tricky teachers — and how can we incorporate these lessons into our daily lives?

In what ways do indigenous people benefit from the Western interest in shamanism, and what new cultural bridges are being built through the spread of indigenous spiritual practices?

As of November 16, 2010, the criminal charges against Taita Juan have been dropped. Within the next couple of days, the court will begin the process of transferring Taita Juan out of prison to the immigration authorities who will make arrangements for his return to Colombia.

On Tuesday, October 19, 2010, the Indigenous Colombian healer was detained in the Houston International Airport. He was formally arrested by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) for possession of his traditional medicine Ayahuasca.

Taita Juan Agreda Chindoy is an indigenous Cametsa traditional healer from the Sibundoy Valley in the Alto Putumayo of Colombia. In addition to being recognized by the Colombian Ministry of Health, he is a recognized lineage holder of traditional Amazonian medicine and an established healer and leader in his community.

According to a report from Caracol Radio, one of the main radio networks in Colombia,”a Federal Court ruled his release when his attorney showed that Yage (ayahuasca) is a medicinal plant used by indigenous as traditional medicine, and does not generate dependency”.

Among Agreda’s legal defense team is Nancy Hollander. Nancy was the lead attorney that was successful before the Supreme Court in granting the UDV church legal authorization for the religious use of ayahuasca.

Support came from around the world as many people came to Juan’s side, both physically and spiritually, including reports that Colombian embassy officials visited Juan last week, reportedly offering their support. Indigenous rights groups, human rights organizations and networks of the vast ayahuasca community are also among those who came to his aid.

More than €1800 gathered from fundraising initiatives in Europe has been presented to Juan’s family who are “overwhelmed with joy”. The Free Taita Juan campaign raised over $14,000 for his legal defense.

Summary:
This dissertation examines the cultural construction of ayahuasca (an Amazonian hallucinogen) and shamanism, their manifestations in the western imagination and experience, and their localized experience in the city of Iquitos, Peru, in the context of the phenomenon of shamanic tourism. Shamanic tourism has flourished in the last few years and is promoted internationally by several agents both local and western. The authors embarked on this research in order to answer two questions: first, what are the motives of westerners who participate in ayahuasca ceremonies, and second, how do they conceptualize and integrate their experiences in their existing worldview. Iquitos, Peru was chosen as a research site because as a gateway to the eco- and shamanic tourism serves as a location where different cultural constructions of ayahuasca co-exist, namely the urban mestizo and western, it can offer a better perspective on the appropriation of ayahuasca by westerners.

The author places the phenomenon of shamanic tourism within the historical context of the relationship of the West with the exotic and spiritual “other”, a history that has gone hand in hand with colonialism and exploitative relationships. She argues that shamanic tourism is not an anomaly but is consistent with the nature of shamanism, which has historically been about intercultural exchange, as shamanic knowledge and experience has been sought cross-culturally. In addition, in the West, esoteric knowledge has often been sought in faraway places, thus this intercultural exchange is also consistent with Western tradition. The research has shown that western interest in ayahuasca is much more than a pretext for drug use but rather is often perceived as a pilgrimage and should be looked at in the context of a new paradigm, or rather a shift in the discourse about plant hallucinogens, a discourse that tackles them as sacraments, in sharp contrast to chemical drugs. Ritual in this context is instrumental but not as something that reproduces social structure; rather it fosters self transformation while at the same time challenging the participants’ very cultural constructs and basic assumptions about the world.

Download the PDF

Audio from the segment entitled Perspectives on Ayahuasca Healing is available now on the SAC website.

The papers in this panel will explore a range of perspectives on healing related to the entheogenic plant mixture ayahuasca, traditionally used in the Amazon basin. Bringing together perspectives from diverse disciplines, it will shed light on the ways healing takes place in an ayahuasca ritual, the ways it is perceived by participants and even explore the ways that ayahuasca can be integrated in more western modes of healing. These papers will address the question of the healing potential of ayahuasca in a global environment and provide much needed insight into the modes of healing of entheogens in general.

Chair: Evgenia Fotiou
Participants: Brian Anderson, Susana Bustos, Erik Davis, Richard Doyle, Frank Echenhofer, Evgenia Fotiou, Francis Jervis, Stephen Trichter
Discussant: Stephan Beyer

Peter Gorman has been places. He’s been inside, outside, upside, downside, this side, that side, and the other side. In the words of Dennis McKenna; Peter Gorman has “been way, way beyond the chrysanthemum on many a dark jungle night.” And that’s putting it mildly.

His new book Ayahuasca in My Blood: 25 Years of Medicine Dreaming, is brewed with an enchanting lucidity. To read it is to drink down a story, a whirlwind, a wild fire of spirits and curanderos, pirates and teachers, frogs and vines, snakes and shamanism, plants and visions woven across the arc of a quarter century’s worth of heavyweight Amazonian, Texan and New York City adventures.

Written with the total recall of an expert investigative journalist, prepared with the special flair and flavors of a Master Chef, the book is spun lavishly, elegantly. Reading the book places you deep in the forest, late at night, around a small campfire, listening to a savvy bard recount terrifying ghost stories. Stories you might only barely admit to believing. Thing is, these stories, and the storyteller, are realer than real. Furthermore, the ghosts in these stories appear to you in sharp focus, they surround, they approach, touch, terrify, cajole and, they are ones holding lights up to their faces.

Ayahuasca in My Blood articulates very clearly Gorman’s relationship with the realms of the “way, way beyond”. It must be said, however, that Peter has also been, and remains, very down-to-earth.

The heart of the book concerns Peter’s extraordinary experiences with ayahuasca. However, his struggles with his family, his work, his truck, his ranch in Texas, his life in NYC and his old bar in Iquitos all play major roles in an intense narrative that manages to include magnificent, informal biographies of three of his most important and respected teachers; Moises Torres Vienna, an ex-military man who first takes Gorman out into the deep green, imparting lessons in survival; Pablo, the powerful Matses headman who introduced Peter to sapo—the now legendary frog venom medicine; and of course the story of the humble and potent curandero, Don Julio Jerena.

Ayahuasca books are bursting forth like wildflowers, yet rare is it to find one’s self SCUBA diving through the veins of someone who’s traversed this terrain as long, deep and freaky as Gorman has.

Try as I might to avoid presumptions, or pull cliches, it must be said that Ayahuasca in My Blood is destined to become a classic. In fact it’s already there. More than that, it’s a valuable reflection on the nature of shamanism, a reflection that has not, to my knowledge, ever been illuminated in such a visceral way.

If one considers the spectrum of related literature—take for example William S. Burroughs’ The Yajé Letters, Terence McKenna’s True Hallucinations, Wade Davis’ One River, Jimmy Weiskopf’s Yajé: The New Purgatory, or Steve Beyer’s Singing to the Plants—Peter Gorman’s Ayahuasca in My Blood weighs in amongst these giants and, in many ways, ties them all together.

Like Gorman, William S. Burroughs stumbled into the role of being a precedent setting, right-place-at-the-right-time gringo drawn to the jungle and its medicines long before most of the world even caught a whisper of anything to do with ayahuasca. Terence McKenna went very, very deep and utterly lived (and loved) to tell the tale, however tall and unlikely it may have seemed to be. Wade Davis, the gifted writer and explorer, wove together a story of the jungle, plants, and his friends and mentors Richard Evans Schultes and Tim Plowman. Jimmy Weiskopf courageously detailed his own hell, transformation and learning, and Steve Beyer simply laid it all out in one fell swoop.

Ayahuasca in My Blood is a mix of all of the above. What distinguishes the book is in part due to Gorman’s style as a writer, he’s most certainly and abundantly endowed with the Irish gift of gab, and a memory of unparalleled clarity. However, perhaps more importantly, is in how this book casts, with tremendous verve, the doors of perception wide open, busting them off their hinges, sending them flying into the deepest void you care to imagine, where a great wind sweeps you clean off your feet, rockets you head over heels into a whole other ballgame, brings you back to reality, momentarily, then threatens you, teases you, provokes, challenges and simply never lets up until you find yourself dropped, like some kind of jungle-fied Dorothy, breathless, in the eye of a poltergeist tornado, with a snake in your stomach and bills to pay.

There are very few people alive who have 25 or more years experience with ayahuasca, most of them are the old mestizo and indigenous shamans of South America. Rarer still are those among this experienced group who are willing and able to write about their experiences. Peter Gorman, in opening his heart, his life and his talents, shares a masterwork in this respect; a tremendously earthy, rich, poetic, way-out and honestly magical artifact, gathered from the deepest of depths.

MORGAN MAHER: What first brought you to the Amazon jungle?

PETER GORMAN: I always loved travelling. Starting in high school I began to hitchhike, eventually crossing the U.S. several times and logging about 50,000 miles on my thumb. Feeling like I’d seen a good deal of the U.S., I headed out to Europe and then on to Mexico for a few months.

In Mexico I fell in love with the Lacandon jungle in Chiapas. I’d have gone back but the woman I lived with bought me a book on my return called Headhunters of the Amazon, by a fellow named Up de Graf. I think it was published in 1923, but it dealt with his time in the Ecuadorian and Peruvian Amazon from about 1896-1906 or something like that. Large sections of the book took place on the Yavari River, the border between Brazil and Peru. He painted it as a wild place, a no man’s land. So I decided to go see that river.

The nearest jumping off point was Iquitos, Peru, and so that’s where I went in 1984 with a couple of pals. I returned in 1985 to do a month of jungle survival training with a fantastic guide and teacher, Moises Torres Vienna.

I didn’t get to the Yavari right away, but did get there in 1986, and in 1988 spent some weeks there. A couple of years later I was able to secure my own boat and run the length of that river. It was as wild when I reached it as it sounded like it was for Up de Graf.

Much of the book, and your experiences in the jungle, is inspired and connected to your friend and teacher Don Julio Jerena. Could you tell us about Julio?

Julio…hmmm. Well, he was the local curandero—healer—on the Aucayacu River, about 212 km south of Iquitos, not far from the river town of Genero Herrera. I first met him in 1985, when Moises took me out that way. He was small, strong, handsome. He had a bright smile and ears that were too big for his head. But he had a light in his eyes that I’d rarely seen. He was impish, full of fun, and an amazing healer. He was also the father of a pretty huge brood: I know nine of his children—the youngest born when he was 70—and I’m told there are a few I’ve never met.

In real life, he supported his family with his military pension, which was several hundred dollars a month because he’d been in action in two wars as a young man, and as a fisherman. He was the simplest of men. He loved living on his little river, loved his small fields of yuca and sugarcane, corn and plantains. He loved his boiled fish and plantains. He loved to laugh. He was elegantly humble.

But he was also a man of immense power. When he walked in the jungle he didn’t slash at the underbrush, he sort of waved at it with his machete as though the suggestion that the vines part was enough to get the vines to part. And most of the time it almost seemed as that were true. He healed with a wonderful touch, using ayahuasca to connect with the spirits—the sentient side—of the plants he’d need to utilize to heal a wide variety of ailments. Over the years I saw him work on snakebites, sick children, cancer patients (that one was one of my guests, and she got several more years than she thought she would), fungal infections, parasites—a host of things a lot of medical doctors would have a tough time healing. And he loved doing that.

What lessons did he impart upon you?

How to laugh when kids are driving you up the wall. How to apply patience to jobs to get the work done. To realize that the spirit of ayahuasca and the spirits of the other plants, and the guardian spirits are the doctors and that if we’re lucky enough to get the chance to heal someone sometimes to never believe that we are the doctors. To understand that this world, this universe and the other realities are all connected and that we have the ability to connect with it all.

What lessons, or what kinds of lessons, have the plants taught, or continue to teach you?

That’s not easy to answer. I am just whoever I am. I’m a dad, a journalist, a guy trying to put good healthy food on the table. Someone who has cats and dogs and chickens and ducks and birds and a goat and who tries to remember to feed them all before I feed myself.

Would I be who I am if I’d never gone to the Amazon? If I’d never had ayahuasca? I don’t know. I would still be me, but I’d be a different me. But what part of that can I compartmentalize to say “Oh, that’s the ayahuasca?” versus just plain “Oh, that’s the experience of living, of raising kids” or whatnot?

A great deal of the work that ayahuasca and other plants have done on me, I think, relates to my heart. To the ability to love freely, knowing there’s no shortage of what you can give. To forgive freely, knowing that holding the anger or pain is only going to make you sick and will do no one any good.

I think I also understand the first inkling of healing others. Not that that’s something I can do, like a trick. But when my mother-in-law was dying, the plants let me put my hands on her back and absorb the heat her body was putting out. They allowed me to take it and eliminate it so that she could sleep. It blistered my hands but gave her rest.

There’s really a great deal of learning that’s gone on. It’s the compartmentalizing that’s difficult to do. In other words, I think I’m a better person than I might have otherwise turned out, but when I look in the mirror I see that I’m still full of flaws.

An important person in your life, and in the book, is your jungle teacher Moises Torres Vienna. Could you tell us about Moises.

Like Julio, Moises was one of three extraordinary teachers I have had as an adult. Four if you include my ex, who taught me an immense amount about the jungle she grew up in. But the three were different. I met Moises with my two pals on my first trip to Peru. We’d seen Cuzco and Machu Picchu and hiked in the Cordillera Blanca near Huaraz and had finally gotten down to the jungle in Iquitos, where I was instantly at home. On our first day there, Moises, a ruggedly handsome former trainer of jungle forces for both the Peruvian and American military, was by then retired and a guide. He approached my friends and I on the street in Iquitos and asked if we wanted a guide.

I was so tired of people saying they were guides by that time that I blew him off. I told my friends we should just catch a big riverboat somewhere and we’d wind up in a jungle town and find a real guide there, rather than use this smarmy little guy.

So we did. We took a boat that took us to a little town—at that time—called Requena on the Ucayali River, headwater for the Amazon. It was a fascinating place. But difficult for gringos, which it didn’t get many of. For a hotel we had to take a place where wood partitions ran halfway up the wall and were topped by wire mesh. The guy downstairs kept a burro that brayed all day and night. We were followed by maybe 100 people everywhere we went—which was up and down the single street of the place. No one could change US money, and nobody had food prepared in restaurants. When you came in and ordered, they went out to try to buy a chicken for your meal.

And nobody would take us into the jungle. They were all afraid of ghosts, Indians and jaguars. People went out as far as their chacras, fields, maybe 1000 yards behind the main street but that was pretty much it. Nobody we met in the nine days we spent there would even consider stepping into the canopy behind the last field.

We spent the nine days in that crazy little place—which has grown up a great deal in the last 26 years—because the water was low that time of year and no riverboats coming from further up the river at Pucallpa could navigate. A couple of days of rain raised the river sufficiently though, and just about the time we were acclimating to Requena, we were out of Peruvian money and had to return to Iquitos.

Shortly after we returned to our little hotel—I always took a single room so that I could make trip notes—there was a knock on the door of Larry and Chuck’s room. It was Moises. The guys got me and Moises asked how things had gone. I told him they’d gone great. He laughed. He said he knew we hadn’t gone to the jungle because nobody in Requena went to the jungle. They were all too afraid. But he would take us to the jungle if we liked. Full jungle was how he put it. Then he added the word “ayahuasca?” which none of us had ever heard of. He explained it was an hallucinogen that was a powerful traditional medicine. We could try it during our time in the full jungle if we liked.

We said okay, negotiated a price and then just as we were finished, he looked at my feet and said, “you can’t come. No boots, no jungle. Spine trees on the jungle floor.”

That was a new take. A Peruvian guide turning down a gringo’s money?

Then he laughed. “Don’t worry. I have a pair of boots that will fit you.”

When he returned that evening with a pair of size 10 leather workboots, I was sold.

Over the years we became great friends. He’d take me out on long hikes, teach me jungle survival—like what vines to drink from and which would kill you—how to figure out if a food was good to eat or poisonous, how to build shelters, set traps, avoid snakes or kill them if you had to, brought me to the Matses, helped me put together my first boat for a 30 day trip on the Yavari. He was patient with a lousy student, made certain his lessons were well learned, was tireless at the end of long hiking days when I was too beat to get a fire and food going, and never forgot to bring extra coffee and a couple of spare packs of smokes for me. And he laughed the whole time doing it. Just a wonderful teacher.

Another element of your experiences in the Amazon concerns your friendship with the Matsés. Could you speak a bit about the Matsés, and perhaps about Pablo in particular?

Now you’re on to the third of my three extraordinary teachers, Pablo, the curaka. Pablo, like Julio and Moises, had this fantastic light in his eyes. All three looked like they were chuckling on the inside, enjoying every minute of living, despite all three of them living in the physically difficult Amazon.

Moises and I ran into some Matses on the Aucayako in 1985. A year later I went to one of the rivers they have traditionally lived on, the Galvez River, which drains into the Yavari. We spent about a month on the river on that trip, moving from camp to camp—there were six camps of Matses at that time up there. Pablo’s was the smallest: Just he and his four wives and his friend Alberto and his two wives, and their kids. Maybe 20 kids all told, though I later met a number of Pablo’s older kids and in all he probably had 30.

Moises and Pablo had history. In 1970 or 1971, Pablo had been a young Matses among a band that had raided the city of Genaro Herrera. They stole machetes and axe heads, several women and two young longhaired Franciscan Friars or monks. They later killed the latter, probably when they discovered they weren’t women.

In retaliation, the Peruvian military bombed the Matses camps for four days. During that same time, Moises, then a sargeant in the military, led a ground group against the Matses. Despite being half-indigenous, Moises cared little for indigenous and always described the ferocity with which he killed some of them with a sort of perverse enjoyment. But he said that changed when he saw Pablo and some other Matses trying to down the Peruvian bombers with their bows and arrows. “They were completely unafraid,” he said. “And Pablo was the bravest. I admired his courage and we became friends because he said he admired my courage as well.”

Meeting Pablo was no disappointment. He took me hunting, showed me medicinal plants, gave me my first dose of sapo—frog sweat—and laughed when I was writhing in pain on the ground. He talked with plants and animals and swore they talked back. He’d blow nu-nu, a tobacco and macambo snuff, at the clouds to keep it from raining and damned if it might not be raining all around the little camp but not in it. He really was one of the last of the “antiguas”, the old timers who knew the old ways of the Matses, and those ways involved deep interaction with the jungle in ways that seem mysterious and magic to those of us who witness them but don’t understand them.

For medicines, it seemed—and I knew Pablo over a 20 year period, maybe eight long visits in all—like every plant was a cure. If it wasn’t a cure it provided food or shelter or the material to make hammocks with. He’d use plant medicines like nu-nu to see where to hunt the following day—and he had to hunt well to feed all those wives and kids. He shared everything with me, even tried to get me to go on a raid to a distant village to rob some champi—young girls so that I could have a couple of wives. That was the only adventure on which I turned him down.

He’s the man responsible for the medical breakthroughs now being made using the peptides from his sapo frog—which turned out, when I was able to bring it out of the jungle—to be the phylomedusa bicolor, the giant monkey tree frog. And because of his work—primarily—on plant collecting with me for Shaman Pharmaceuticals in the early 1990s, he’s the reason that all of the Matses are now the only tribal group in all of Peru that now has permanently demarked land along with air, water and mineral rights. That was something Shaman arranged after the second of my very successful medicinal plant collecting trips on the Yavari and Galvez rivers. My trips, but it was Pablo and a couple of others at different camps, who produced the goods for Shaman. I was just the conduit.

I’ve written a lot about Pablo and plant collecting, and someday I would like to just write about Pablo the person. He was just an hilarious character top to bottom.

How has your life changed over the course of more than 25 years learning and working with ayahuasca?

Well, now that you’ve gotten me talking about my three great human teachers, I will add ayahuasca as my great plant-spirit teacher. My life changed? Don’t know because it’s the only life I’ve had. And that includes those guys, that jungle, those rivers, the sounds, the shapes, the food, the rain, the crossing of log bridges… and ayahuasca is a big part of that. But my life also includes being an investigative journalist, a dad, a brother, a plumber when the sink gets clogged, and everything else that goes into living. For me, it’s just a life. Ayahuasca and the jungle are not separate, have not been separate from my normal life since I met them. Sometimes I’m in the U.S, sometimes in the jungle, but it’s all one life.

I really think that ayahuasca, more than anything, has shown me in a very real and concrete way, that things like personal guardians exist, that everything is sentient and must be respected on equal value with everything else. I mean the old coffee grinds as well as the tallest tree, as well as that fly that’s buzzing around you incessantly. It’s showed me the value of life in a way I was taught but didn’t understand. It’s allowed me to see the other realms, to even sometimes operate in them to affect changes in this realm. It’s filled me with wonderment about every single day. I wake up wondering what’s going to be shown to me every morning and I love that.

I might have done that without my three teachers and ayahuasca, but I’m not sure. I do know that I used to push love away, thinking somehow I wasn’t good enough or worthy, and that in the last 10 years I’ve learned to say “give it here! Gimme what you got!” and to give it away freely as well. That’s one place where I think the change in me is noticeable. To me at least.

In what ways has your experience and relationship with ayahuasca affected your day-to-day life?

Well, I like that I can fly now, And having superstrength is a gas….kidding. Ayahuasca is part of my day to day life, so I don’t know, beyond what I’ve said about giving and receiving love, how else it’s changed things. The spirits in general, have been helpful: they’ll sometimes tell me what plants a person needs to use to rid themselves of a physical ailment, or get in my face if I start overreacting to the kids and bring out the dad voice too quickly. They remind me when I’ve had too much to drink and think I can drive just to the corner….and then they’ll make the keys disappear if I try to ignore them. And I am very glad they do those things. I’m very appreciative.

Your book is filled with amazingly detailed descriptions of your ayahuasca visions. Perhaps they could even be described as experiences, in that you tend to go far beyond what may be commonly associated as “ayahuasca visions”. For example you describe going to “The red room. The place where the healing happens”, or the market “where you get the medicines” or Joe’s Café. What do these kinds of places mean to you, and how have they changed your perception reality?

Those places are real places. Something to remember is that our human brain needs to compartmentalize things. Since we’re not brought up dealing with spirits on a day-to-day basis, when we run into one, we tend to give it a human or monstrous shape—a shape it might not have at all. But our brain needs to be able to process things so we give those spirits a shape, a name, a visual we can deal with so our brain won’t explode from not knowing how to process the information.

Now the “red room” is how I see a particular place. That place is an unmeasurably large cavern where all of the pain and suffering, all of the rotten deeds and selfish acts go. And in that place there are spirits who know how to transform that pain and horror into something positive so it can be let out into our world again without hurting anyone anymore. So when I’m called on to take someone’s pain or grief or whatnot, I don’t want to just keep it or it’ll stay with me. So having been shown the red room—and someone else’s brain would have them perceive it entirely differently—I know that’s the perfect place to put that awful stuff I’ve taken out of somebody. So to me it’s a place of transformation for rotten, pain and anguish causing feelings and suffering that’s very accessible in real life terms. I just open the door—which happens to be right next to me when I need it—and ask those spirits to take that junk and transform it into something good.

The market to get the medicines is another interesting place. I’m not someone who knows all the plants—heck I probably know less than the average person. Still, I’m sometimes asked to come up with a remedy for someone. And the guardians—call them guardian angels if that’s more comfortable, though they don’t look like classic angels to me—know that, so they very nicely introduced me to a market filled with plants. And when someone needs something, I go to that market—no, you can’t see it, it’s only in my perception the way it is—and shout out the name of the illness or problem that needs fixing. And the plants are so freaking generous they just sometimes shout out the name or names of those that I’ll need. And then I’ll write them down and relay the information. Ridiculous on the face of it, and I’ll probably be sent to the looney bin for even suggesting what I’ve just said. Still, even when I’m given a plant name I’ve never heard of, I can usually find it on the net and because the plants are so generous, the use of the plant is generally spot on for what needs healing.

Joe’s Café is another spot. Just a little café where you get to see things not normally visible to the human eye. It’s not around all the time, just when I need it.

Now, the most important thing to remember with all these places, these gifts, is that I’ve been warned they can’t be used selfishly. I couldn’t go to Joe’s Café and see who is going to win a ball game tomorrow night. If I did and then bet on the outcome, I’m sure I’d lose, and not only that, I’d probably never be allowed to go to the café again.

Also important to remember is that while this stuff is crazy, it’s not. It’s just accessing other realities that exist but move at maybe a different vibratory speed than the reality in which we exists does.

And facilitating access to those realities are what the plant teachers like Ayahuasca and San Pedro and Peyote do. The codicil—if that’s the right word—is that once you’ve opened the door to those realities, once you’ve broadened the bandwidth of your sight to see those realities or experience them, you probably won’t be able to fully close that door again. And that’s pretty frightening to some people. I mean, to say there are ghosts is one thing. To have them waking you at 3 AM while they clomp around the kitchen is quite another.

What guides you?

A simple sense that this could be a wonderful world if we’d all just pitch in and make it one. In journalism my work involves trying to expose rotten and vile things so that we can see them for what they are and eliminate them. Sometimes that means exposing the horror the war on drugs creates—from politically/financially motivated private prisons to mandatory sentencing laws to property forfeiture, to keeping hemp illegal when it might do so much good if its status was changed.

Other times I’m motivated because I see the poor getting shafted in a million ways, or how the U.S. can manipulate politics around the globe to ensure benefit to private companies at the expense of whole populations.

Those things motivate me and they become my guide posts as well. I’m not going to fix this damned world, but I am damned sure allowed to keep trying in my own way.

Then there are my jungle groups, where I take guests out into the deep green and have them experience the jungle and ayahuasca in a pretty traditional setting. So many of those guests are so ripe for change, so hoping to change their lives—even if they don’t know it—that those trips often are just the thing they needed to either find a new direction in their lives or to give them the courage to deal with their lives in a more positive way. Those people, already good people, mostly just need a little polishing after life has kicked them around some. And I love being able to put them in touch with the things that can polish them up. Cause that makes a better world too.

What is important to you?

My kids, my friends, the under-served, underprivileged, the folks getting the short end of things. And my ex-wife’s new babies. And my granddaughter. And the dog and cats and everything else we take care of. What’s important to me is to keep looking at life like a new thing. To keep working to get the same gleam in my eye over living that Julio, Moises and Pablo always did.

What is the most frightening thing you’ve encountered?

My own selfish behaviour. Watching and being forced to relive some of the stupid, selfish things I’ve done over and over before Ayahuasca will let me vomit them out. The spirits can be demanding and they can be very very frightening, but in the end it’s my own negativity, my own failures, my own stupidity, my own self-centeredness that provokes the greatest fear. And when the medicine tells me we’re going to be working on something related to that on a given night, well, many times I have tried my best to run away from the experience out of sheer terror.

You’ve experienced many different peoples, plants and places. What is it about the Amazon and ayahuasca that continues to captivate you so?

In all my time in Peru, both as a guest and when I lived there and ran my bar, I have never once gone to sleep without having learned something new. That is a very amazing thing to be able to say. And that is something that keeps the Amazon, the jungle, the rivers, the medicine fresh. It just thrills me to be there.

Of course, there’s a lot about it I don’t like. I don’t like the noise of the motorcars, I don’t like the dust in the air and the diesel fuel smells in Iquitos. I can get bored when I have done my work for the day—and when I get bored I want a drink to get a party going, and that’s led to some hilarious and not so hilarious events over the years. But overall, something still happens every day, and I mean every day, that makes me look at the world with just a slightly different pair of eyes when I go to bed than I had when I woke up. That’s a pretty irresistible lure for me.

I’ve asked this kind of question before, and I know you’re a fantastic chef so I’ll ask you, too; You’re out in the jungle, you’ve packed some fruit and vegetables with you and some supplies. You’re hungry, you’ve got a few of your team with you, some of them just returned from hunting, others from fishing. It’s a beautiful day and you’ve all worked very hard. What are you going to cook up?

Well, I’m not much on most jungle meats—I’m just not big on monkeys and sloths and such—but if my guys happened to come on a majas, a large jungle rodent, well, for sure we’re gonna roast some of that. It’s one of the few animals in the jungle that has fat on it, and when that fat starts to drip into the flames, well…..

Now if the guys were attacked by a cayman and had to kill it, we’d cut the tail into thick steaks and grill them, then slather them in lime and garlic…

If the guys fishing happened to bring back a couple of fat piranha’s, well, put those guys on the grill and toss a bit of vinegar on them, and some wild cilantro if we can find some. Piranha are some of the best eating fish in the world.

For fruits, I can always go for a thick slice of jungle papaya with lime juice and a bit of salt.

For starch, I’d try to find a couple of yuca roots. Just boil them simply is good by me, or, if you’ve got a bit of oil, sauté them babies.

For veggies, let’s do a stir fry with ginger, cabbage, cauliflower, green beans, tomatoes, spinach and whatever else we’ve got or can find.

If we have some Ucayali beans—kind of like a pinto bean that comes from the Amazon–with us and we were smart enough to start them early, well, we’d have a little oil with lots of garlic and onion—or onion grass if we don’t have onions—in the pot. When that was just right, I’d fill the pot with water, add the beans when it’s boiling, toss in several diced tomatoes and some acholte or cumin other local spice. And four hours later, when the beans were ready, I’d finish it off with fresh cilantro. If we don’t have any, I’d put some Yerba Louisa, lemon grass, in to give it that final bite.

That sounds like a pretty good meal to me, even if nobody has any majas or cayman tail or piranha.

Your book is fecund, and flowing with amazing stories and experiences. Any stories that you would have loved to fit in, but somehow couldn’t? Anything left untold?

There are a lifetime of stories not in the book. The book concentrates on ayahuasca and my relationship with it. There is some jungle, some damned good adventure, some love, some loss, victories and defeats, but it’s primarily about ayahuasca’s relation to all of that. Each of the two plant collecting trips in my own boats from Iquitos to Leticia to Angamos and up the Galvez—30-plus day trips after the month of finding and rebuilding the old boats I used—could be it’s own book. Trips up the Rio Napo are not even mentioned. A hike from Tamishacu to the Rio Midi is passed over. That was a good one. It was my first time, real time spent on the Yavari River. Moises and I hiked maybe four days to a little town on the Rio Midi, which lets out into the Yavari. Our plan was to make a balsa raft and float to the Yavari and from there, float down to Leticia in Colombia, where we would catch a boat down to Iquitos. Problem was, the river was too low for that. Also, there was very little balsa available.

We arrived in the little town just as they were starting a 3-day celebration of Peru’s Independence from Spain. That was quite a party. People came from all over that part of the jungle to dance, sing, drink and feast nonstop. You’d be given a huge gourd of fermented masato, maybe a quart, and drink it down till it was finished. Everyone would cheer. Then they’d give you another, and another. So you had to vomit out what you drank to make room for more. So everybody was vomiting, and drinking and vomiting….most wonderfully hilarious party I ever attended. And this was good masato—the yuca had been properly chewed and spit out by the women, helping it ferment and giving it just the right texture. Bit of an acquired taste.

At the end of the party, with no raft, we convinced one of the partygoers to take us down to the Yavari and then down to Leticia. The problem was, he had little gas. Just about enough for the few hours it would take his little 15 Hp motor to the mouth of the Midi.

Moises was certain that once we got there we could get gasoline to continue the trip. Well, we went from one little shack—they were pretty well spread out—to another on our first day on the Yavari and came up empty. We had to paddle with one oar as that’s all the man had, most of that day. And that night we got stuck in a very slow whirlpool that simply spun us around and around all night long. We all woke up sick from the spinning.

On the second day, Moises changed tact. He ordered me to carry our shotgun, and he’d approach a little hut owned by some fisherman and I’ve have to point that shotgun in the general direction of someone and he’d demand whatever gas they had. Now most everybody out there had a half a gallon of gas stashed somewhere, so we spent days going half-gallon by half-gallon, essentially stealing everybody’s gas on the river. We promised we’d return it when the boatman came back upriver, but nobody believed us.

So there we were, stealing gas, and our boatman was sure we were gonna leave him stranded in Leticia with no gas for himself and no gas to pay back to people, so he was afraid he was going to get killed when he returned home.

He wasn’t. We were good for our word. In the Brazilian town of Benjamin Constant, right next to Leticia, we stopped at a floating service station and I bought—on credit—two 55 gallon drums of gasoline. The boatman got one for his work, and everybody else was to get double what we took from them at shotgun point.

It wound up working out fine, and everybody remembered me as a good guy when I returned to them in my own boat a couple of years later. We just laughed about it over masato.

There was also no room, or place in the book, for a recent story when I came on an illegal logging operation and some of my team and I, at my direction, cut all the logs in the log raft loose and floated them down to a large lake where they dispersed everywhere. My hope was that the logger would have to spend enough time regathering them that he’d lose his profit and decide not to illegally log anymore, at least on that river.

And there was very little room in the book for talking about being the only gringo in a place like Iquitos to run a bar. And one that was on an old port on the roughest corner in town. There were a million stories out of that place, and I think people still talk about The Cold Beer Blues Bar down there, even when I’m not around. I probably still get 30 emails a year from strangers asking where it is. And it’s been closed for almost 10 years.

And the markets, and having an extended family, and getting friends out of jail and run ins with DEA types and military guys and getting bitten by piranas and flesh eating spider bites and having to do nearly a whole trip on a broken ankle and having an intestine explode in the middle of a trip and what it’s like to hang around the docks in the third world, or fly in little Cessna’s without any instrumentation over that vast forest, or collecting artifacts for the Museum of Natural History in New York, running into huge boas, having a boat of mine attacked by black cayman … there are lots of things in the book, and I hope it’s a great read and all that, but there’s lots more to tell. It’s been one heck of a life.

Peter Gorman’s Ayahuasca in My Blood: 25 Years of Medicine Dreaming is available now in hardcover, paperback and ebook.

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