INTERVIEW WITH A LOTUS EATER
by Linda Brookover

He could be the person sitting next to you on an airplane. He winters in Arizona, summers in Wisconsin, plays golf, and travels to Africa. But once in a while, as he reaches the age at which he can qualify for full social security benefits, he is up for a certain kind of travel adventure.

OW: When you went to Peru were you particularly looking for an hallucinogenic experience?

LUTHER: No, not really. I had read the Wild Mushroom Travelling Road Show literature several years ago and my focus wasn't exactly that, but that's what happened. The more that I travel the more that I seek to make a connection with the rest of the world and the oneness in it. Maybe people from other parts of the world are not able to come to me, but I can go to them.

OW: Can you pinpoint where exactly this trip occurred?

LUTHER: We boarded the houseboat in Iquitos and then we went North on the Amazon and then we went off into the tributaries--the remote tributaries where normally no boats are going. During the day, the motor canoes travel up the tributaries to visit the tribes who are not normally visited by Westerners. As we got up there, we'd be visiting with these tribes and they'd have these gourds that were cups and we'd mention the words ayahuasca and then they'd get this really interesting look on their faces

OW: Do you think that traveling the Amazon with native shamans is unusual for someone in your age group?

LUTHER: A lot of people there were in my age group. There were a couple of people from Russia who were just a little bit younger than I was.

OW: Were you interested in revisiting your psychedelic experiences from the past? Or is this type of exploration completely new to you ?

LUTHER: I never used drugs previously . I had always intended to do an experience with hallucinogens when I was younger and had always decided that I wasn't ready for it at the time. I thought, well, I'm going to wait until I am totally comfortable with it, so my statement to myself and to other people was "when I get to a certain point in my life I will go and sit on top of a mountain and experience drugs.". Oddly enough, when I went down to the Amazon, I realized that it was my mountain.

OW: So ayahuasca revealed itself to you as part of this journey, it wasn't something you were sure you would try when you departed?

LUTHER: I knew what I was getting into because I had read the travel company material and then I had read books about shamanism. When I went I knew what the possibilities were, but I never knew about the extent of that type of experience.

OW: What is the ayahuasca experience?

LUTHER: Ayahuasca is a spiritual potion that the shaman prepares from the vines of the jungle. They call it "the vine of the dead" or "the drink of the dead." What happens is that each shaman prepares it a little differently and perhaps uses different vines and plants of the jungle. Not being an expert, I am only repeating what I have read and what I have heard. But anyway, they prepare these plants and I think that each shaman prepares a different type of potion.

It is a drink that is designed for spiritual awareness and for healing. When I took the drink, they told me that it is a very spiritual journey and they created it. I perceived that they asked me to bless it myself. So I asked the drink for some blessings and I asked it to give me the vision of oneness, as I want to understand oneness in the universe.

OW: Did you have any idea what was going to happen to you after you drank it?

LUTHER: No, I had no idea at all.

OW: Was there a ceremony that surrounded your drinking ayahuasca?

LUTHER: No, there wasn't. Our guides went into the jungle beforehand to create a space for us and as they did this they would try to remove the vines and undergrowth and also the snakes. Then we took motorboats from the main houseboat to this remote spot in the jungle and we got there and we were attended by some of the Indians that were traveling with us on the boat as attendants and workers. The shamans, three of them, they created an altar or a basin and put various things on the mesa, crystal and tobacco and things like that. I perceived that it was set up as some kind of a sacrificial area.

OW: Why do you say "sacrificial"?

LUTHER: That's just the impression I had. They were just putting things there to appease the spirits that were going to join us.

OW: So the things like tobacco, were the offerings. The crystals interest me. What part did they play in the ayahuasca drinking?

LUTHER: I don't know. I brought some crystals along with me and I donated them to the shamans later on. They wholeheartedly accepted them. And I brought about a dozen crystals as gifts that I was going to give them. They mysteriously disappeared. I have no idea where they went. Nothing else disappeared from my room. Only those crystals which I bought to give as gifts. And I had other crystals in my room--just for me personally to have in my room.

OW: How long did the ayahuasca last?

LUTHER: About three to four hours. What happened is we went into the jungle and sat down and they came by to offer us the drink. The shamans indicated that there was a depository area which they pointed out. They jokingly called it the "vomitorium," and they said that within a half an hour to 45 minutes we would feel quite nauseous. My vision started within about 20 minutes, and then they came by again to see if anybody wanted more and I took another drink. And the vision just got really fantastic.

OW: Would you mind sharing a bit about what you experienced then?

LUTHER: When I got into the ayahuasca, I had asked to understand the oneness. I looked up in the trees that were over this jungle garden that we were in and I saw animals up there and I saw images of people and plants in the trees. Then I looked down and then I saw things like that near the ground. As I experienced more of the ayahuasca drink I saw these same images which started to interconnect with one another. The animals and the human forms began to intertwine and it was just really fantastic. My vision was just like a huge mural that came to life and encompassed the entire umbrella of the trees on the top. As I looked in the circle where the people were sitting around the altar, they became Egyptian images. Then I looked where the shamans sat they became huge, with big capes on and spirits started to come down to us and hover around the mesa. Spirits came in from all different parts, a 360 degree circle, and sat and visited with us.

OW: What were the spirits like? Could you see them?

LUTHER: They were forms, spiritual forms. I also went back to when I was first born and then to the white light entering the embryo at the moment of conception. Some of the other people saw the very same spirits that I did. Later I saw them again in the Grand Canyon.

OW: Were they all good visions? No scary stuff?

LUTHER: Well in the beginning of the presentation the shamans indicated that the drink comes from God and I perceived that it came from a very spiritual place and that it had some true goodness in it. The shamans then indicated that they were going to do some chanting and if one was to stay in touch with the chanting the visions would not be bad. If I was going into a bad place, and I connected with the chanting I would be safe from any scary visions. And that truly happened. I connected with the chanting and I immediately got back to where I intended to be.

OW: So these guides were there for you in case you needed them?

LUTHER: Yes, the chanting, from what I understand, came from chants that were passed down for thousands of years. Another interesting thing is that I called a man who had been on this trip before I went with Gerry and Chris. This guy had been over to Nepal and had been in another Shamanistic experience almost identical to the one in the rainforest.

OW: Same kind of potion?

LUTHER: I don't know about the potion, but I know the experience was very similar. Knowing this, I had a lot of confidence in the experience. I knew that there was a universal oneness.

OW: What did the shamans look like?

LUTHER: They looked like somebody you might see walking down the street in a third world country and not think too much about them at all.

OW: Did they wear any kind of ceremonial clothing?

LUTHER: No, not at all. These were the same people that were assisting the crew on the boat. In fact, they carried out mundane duties.

OW: What really set them apart? What made them shamans?

LUTHER: There was one man who was eighty years old and, when I looked into his eyes, they were so deep, they were like pools. That's where you see the difference-- in their eyes.

OW: So it's nothing overt? No way to tell who is a shaman?

LUTHER: No, its nothing that would appear from an external standpoint when you look at them and they would look different than anybody else, other than looking into their eyes. It is the understanding and the terrific amount of feeling that they have.

OW: It sounds like they're perfectly willing to share this with other people, or are there any exceptions? If they run into someone they're not really sure about do they include them in the ayahuasca drinking?

LUTHER: Anybody who was there was allowed to participate.

OW: Most outsiders think that native people are clandestine in their ceremonies and want to keep them a secret, but I guess not in this case.

LUTHER: No, in the Amazon, not at all. They are very much looking to share the experience. The next day , because I had such a fantastic vision, they sat down with me personally and wanted to know what I had seen and what I had heard, and they tried to guide me as to what the meaning was. They did this for each person individually on the trip.

OW: How were you communicating with the shaman?

LUTHER: They spoke very limited English. There were people there that acted as interpreters.

OW: Do men and women alike partake?

LUTHER: Both. It is my understanding that if desired they can partake in ayahuasca twice a week. But some of them don't partake in it at all.

OW: They must have a really different perception of the world than we do!

LUTHER: Absolutely, they have an inner peace that I don't see in ourselves. When I got on the plane to leave I had been living and visiting people who were supposedly savages, perhaps fearsome; but when I looked at our Western counterparts with their eyes darting around everywhere that's where I saw the savages. So my perception of savageness changed because in the Indians there was no savageness; but the in the western world we acquire the savageness as a need and an instinct to survive.

OW: Did you want to try it again in two days?

LUTHER: Yes. After we were finished we got into the boats and went back and sat around drinking a few Peruvian beers and talked about the experience. I shared what I had seen, and they shared that same information with me. What they said was that I seemed to be healthy physically and emotionally which was really positive for me. I thought I would do it again. Prior to going on the trip I had been to see a spiritual person and we started talking about past lives. I wanted to go back beyond the womb and I tried really hard to get there, but just couldn't seem to go back any farther than that. The first experience, I just let it go the way it went. For the second one, when I tried to get back further, I started experiencing images of things in my twenties. These baseball figures just started coming at me and I couldn't get away from them. I knew that I was being explored by the shaman too.

OW: So you're off to your next adventure--not as hallucinogenic this time perhaps.

LUTHER: Yes, we're going to Africa, where by the way I'm told there was a kind of drink that you used to be able to buy over the counter until a few years ago, that was like ayahuasca. But no, this is not that kind of a trip. I am interested in exploring the possibilities of traveling to Nepal, though, where they have a similar shamanistic tradition that I can partake in.

OW: Ahh, your mountain top.

LUTHER: Yes.

OW: Have a nice trip.

Pablo Amaringo, the seventh of thirteen children, was born in 1943 in Puerto Libertad, a small settlement near the town of Tamanco in Peru. His parents were small farmers. While Quechua was the mother tongue of his parents, they raised their children to speak Spanish. Many of Pablo's ancestors were healers and shamans. Pablo had completed only two years of schooling when his father abandoned the family. They lost their farm and moved to Pucallpa. After two more years of school, Pablo was forced to work to help support his family. At 15, he worked on the docks in Pucallpa. After falling critically ill, and with his family in extreme poverty, he began to draw. He found that he could create bank notes using brushes and Chinese ink. Arrested for counterfeiting, he escaped from jail and fled to Brazil, where he worked for almost two years. He returned to the Peruvian jungle, where he was cured of his heart trouble by a ayahuasquero, or vegetalist shaman. Arrested again for his past crime, he spent several months in jail and was released in 1969. Soon after, Pablo was taught the mysteries of healing by a forest woman who appeared to him in dreams. He practised vegetalismo from 1970 to 1976, travelling throughout the Peruvian Amazon. Plunging deeper and deeper into the power of Ayahuasca, or yajé, an herbal concoction widely used in a shamanic context among the Indian and mestizo population of the upper Amazon, he became tortured by the spirit world. After fighting, and being injured by sorcerers and spirits, he decided to abandon shamanic practices and forsake Ayahuasca. He began to paint, interpreting the other worlds of his experience in his art, and working for preservation of Amazonian environment and culture.

In 1988, Pablo founded the Usko-Ayar school, where he teaches his students to visualize internally what they are going to paint, in the same way that he does himself. "The school's purpose is well defined: it is a tool for the conservation of the Amazonian environment and culture. By observing and depicting nature, people - especially young children - become more aware of its beauty and richness, and they learn to respect it. In addition, the students hope that their paintings will inspire other people to share similar attitudes of appreciation and reverence."* Pablo feels that he has a mission, which is to show through his own paintings glimpses of other dimensions. Language, he says, is an imperfect means of communication. The spirits do not talk, but express themselves through images.

In 1992, Pablo was presented the prestigious Global 500 Peace Prize from the United Nations Environmental program, joining Jacques Cousteau, Chico Mendez, and Jimmy Carter, among many others, as a true hero of the environmental movement. You can read more about Pablo's introduction to and slow education in the way of the shaman in the book Ayahuasca Visions - The Religious Iconography of a Peruvian Shaman by Luis Eduardo Luna - © 1991, 1993, North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, CA, sponsored by The Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences, and from which this biography is summarized. In addition, the photograph of Pablo above is copyrighted by Dr. Luna - no unauthorized reproduction may be made of this text or images.

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