The Shaman and Ayahuasca

In the film, The Shaman and Ayahuasca, there is a sequence where visionary artist Pablo Amaringo is featured.

This part of the film is particularly rich since the visuals that accompany the narrative are striking in their vividness and hues.  The director scans the paintings carefully even up to the point of suggesting the realms and hiearchies depicted are like a sacred scrolls outlining a Mystical cartography.

Of course, they are.  

The realms, the hierachies, the hybrid beings, planes, palaces, on the other hand, are not permanent structures.  These configurations are tentative horizons of meaning in the service of Love and particular ways of understanding the world.  To affix status of invariance to the realms and chase their apparition in a certain ways eludes what the Ayahuasca shamanic tradition purports.

From my own experience and practice in the work and after  many years of immersion with vegetalistas, shamans, baleans and many others who sustain a possibility through the Narratives and embodiments of the Sacred, the shamanic work is a constructivist ontology that has deconstructive features as part of its inherent dynamic.

Simply put,  when you purge physically, psychologically, and spiritually, one is releasing obstructions in all the aforementioned dimensions.   One is dis-assembling, de-constructing, if you will, vital existential processes to  surface with a reintegrated sense of self with con-committants such as the experience of power, awe, luminosity, wonder, innocence, creativity, fearlessness, mystery, interconnectedness:  Mari-ri---the state of the Jaguar mind.

The vegetalistas who opt to speak in terms of Shamanic narratives will all tell you that what you experience in the Ayahuasca journeys is a completly personal engagement with "La Madrecita",  the mother plant spirit.   Or to put it another way,  in the Ayahuasca experience one is having direct immediate reciprocity with the Beloved or the Second face of Divinity.  The intercourse is tremendously personal in its numinous subjectivity through the affective and diagrammatic constructs by which the participant  organizes experience.  In turn, the participant, shaman included, are both operating inside a Habitat composed of culture and cosmology: Earth, sky, Animals, developmental and tribal histories, languages, spectacular defeats, water, flowers,  death,  outrageous victories, the non-visible, and so much more comprise the realms. How these different orders and intensities show up through novel practices post Ayahuasca maneuvers is the art of living and dying well.

Since what is possible to realize through this tradition has indeterminate variation the implication of a Process ontology is there.  Hence its deconstructive features.

Be mindful, as you explore the Shamanic speak and practice, of what you ingest, create, and have faith in.  

In another part of the film,  an interview occurs with Don Solon, a revered teacher.   Solon teaches "confianza"  which in english means confidence.   However, much of the finesse of this state of being can get lost in translation.  The intent of the shaman is to take you to this place suffused with mari-ri,  of confianza,  to dwell as the Jaguar gods, so you too become the first shaman, that is not really the first nor the last... 

So make your path men and women,  I would say in a state of delight and gratitude.