Ceremony #7

As soon as I entered the ceremonial building I could feel the energy.  I felt and manifested gratitude for those that had brought me here.  And the list was long.  It would grow longer as the night progressed.

When the ceremony started and intentions were expressed, I said just that, that I felt gratitude for this space and these people.  And that there was energy in the air.  And that tonight would be special.  And it was.  In the strange way that only a vine ceremony can be: wonderful, painful, and frightening--at the same time.

I came armed with more intentions to this ceremony than to any of the others I've been a part of.  And in case the vine caused me to separate from myself, these intentions were manifested in physical objects in case (as had happened in Costa Rica) I forgot about everything and was looking for clues of my past self.  In this regard,  I brought with me my Buddha symbol to remind me of my Buddha nature and my zen practice, my onk cross for the promise of reuniting my natural self with my false egoic consciousness, and a rosary, in case the shit really hit the fan again and mother aya trounced me down to the ground again where all I could do was pray for deliverance and relief.

However, the totem that I would clutch to most fervently to this ceremony was an Indian feather necklace for courage that I picked up in St. Louis on the way to the ceremony.  I clutched this tightly in my hand during most of the ceremony.  Indeed, I put the cross in with the pictures of my family away from me to be purified in the ceremony.

After we took the first cup of the sacrament, and completed a wonderful yoga/energy/breath practice led by Sandstar we all held hands standing in a circle and I listened to MetaStar speak.  At this time, I begin to enter medicine space.  Time slowed down and when she spoke to the group, it felt as if she was speaking to me alone outside of time and space.  As if the whole play of my life could now be understood without illusion:  as if I was waking up from the dream of my past life into something else that was more real.  Then, as happened before in Costa Rica, the shaman's face turned dark and into a death mask.  And the participants next to her in the ceremony in my peripheral vision turned into wild animals, like standing Buffalo.  When I looked at them directly they returned back to human form.
My first instinct at seeing the death shaman was to turn away in fear like I did before.  But I clutched the Indian feathers and reminded myself that this was my journey.  This is what I came here for.  This is what I was supposed to see.  As soon as this intention manifested, the death mask vanished.  Fear was replaced with gratitude.  Then I remembered my intention to expressed gratitude to those in my life: starting with my mother, and moving through a long list of other people.  Then I looked around me to those in the circle and felt an outpouring of love to these people that were hours ago strangers.  Some where happy, some sad, some self absorbed.  There were lovers holding hands gazing into each others' eyes.

And when the second cup was consumed and we meditated in darkness, I was pulled down into the darkness and I purged again and again.  And my mind told me repeatedly of something in my past that was too horrible to be true.   So I stood up.  And I tried to dance with the darkness even as the swaying more me more sick.

And in the meantime, we talked about Plato's cave.  And we made rhymes and made jokes:

If you think your something better let it go

lest your mind remind you that its just not so

let the strong grow weak

and the smart grow dim

here comes the cycle all over again

verse 2

fuck them if they can't take a joke

joke them if they can't take a fuck.

and we learned funky dance moves.

Epilogue: Katherine Maclean's description of her psychedelic experience in the podcast that we are all a dream dreamed by a vast jungle entity.

The Night After Ceremony #7 and the Night After the Night After Ceremony #7

One practice I learned at the ceremony from one of the participants was to move a ball of awareness/energy (and awareness and energy may be the same--think about it...lol) from different body parts which created (for him) an undulating rippling effect.   In the process, his movements resembled a mime/break dancer during the dance portion of the ceremony.

I tried this when I returned back home and was up in the middle of the night during one of my now common "late night dances" to release energy.  While I certainly don't have the break dance moves yet, I was able to let the energy focus on my heart chakra for a while and then I felt myself channeling all sorts of positive stuff from around me.  My ever growing "Kanko's trance" Spotify playlist was  playing Shimshai & Susana's "Sirenita Bobinzana" which seemed so beautiful at the time that I was just enjoying it and adding many of their other songs to the playlist.  I felt an outpouring of love and imagined how this feeling if nurtured in a supportive community would certainly transform my life into something beautiful.  If this were a cult, I certainly wanted to join and understood/felt the impulse to belong.

I laid down after this.  I wasn't exactly tired, but I wanted to meditate on all the energy that was flowing through me.  I looked upward with eyes closed and eventually entered the dream state where initially I was with one of the self professed Shaman women that I had scheduled to do a podcast with earlier in the week. She looked surprisingly like an old dog--certainly not what I remembered about her.  I wondered if my dream vision of her was more accurate.

Then I entered lucid dream space and could feel my presence moving all about the room.   I remember hearing Sandstar's voice urging me to go deeper into the trance/meditation and to join a group existing in some sort of higher dimension/reality.  So deeper I went.  With my new power, I wanted to visit the moon and I shot up through the sky and was rapidly transported.  I remember being on the white surface of the moon and felt the universe was open to me.  I next wanted to go to Mars which was a longer journey.  As I entered an asteroid belt, I felt the presence of some dark energy and imagined hearing running water from the toilet in the bathroom next to me.  I was immediately whisked back to my body and away from my celestial journey.

However, after I realized that the toilet water was not running, I wanted to return to my lucid dream.  So I again began to meditate.  This time, I did not want to travel in space, but rather time.  I wanted to explore the alleged traumatic event of my childhood which was revealed during Ceremony #7.  Though I did enter lucid dream space again, I was not able to go back in time appreciably.  There was only darkness.  Eventually, I returned back to dream space.  In this dream, I was taking part in a play.  My participation was accidental, as if I had been pulled in off the street to fill in on some part.  Initially, I was just following a group of people who were telling me what I should say and how I should act.  Then I had a script to follow, but the script was impossible to read.

In one of the scenes the main character, a beautiful woman was supposed to kiss me.  Which she did.  I was surprised at the earnestness of her kiss--like she wasn't acting and really loved me.  But it was more than love.  It was warm and hot and it was everything.  I was immediately transported.  In a later scene she kissed me again and I was just following her around like an obedient puppy.  At the back of my mind, I wondered if she was just acting, and if so, what that would mean for me, because I certainly was not acting.

The Night After the Night After Ceremony #7

Once again, I entered lucid dreaming space.  I was in a room that was in retrospect something like my grandparents' front room in Helper, Utah.  But with differences.  To begin with, the workers left open the roof in the back of the house and I climbed up to a universe filled with stars.  I felt as if a portal had been opened to infinity.  I stepped through and had the feeling that if the portal closed behind me I would exist in infinity, alone, for eternity.  This thought scared me initially but must not have ultimately bothered me because I was soon surfing around the stars using a Virabhadrasana 2 pose.

Then I was back in the room screaming.   I don't remember why I was screaming.  I remember thinking that the Louver was next door.  But then I remembered I was alone in the apartment.  I continued in dream space to ascertain what had frightened me, but then I had other dreams.