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 Huachuma the way to heaven

 I was born by circumstances that you may later understand in a house where God was almost a bad word. Where Christ was fiction and religion was the opium of the people. My father, having gone through a Catholic school as a child, having been whipped by teachers and priests, having been tried to indoctrinate, generated a strong rejection of religious institutions. His adolescence and youth was steeped in Buddhism, Lanza del Basto’s Pacifism, Zen, Taoism and Shinto animism. At the same time, his mind and his work kept a great fascination for science, the scientific method, matter. His profession was that of a sculptor. Touching, seeing, feeling, molding nature was his daily work. Although he always spoke of animism as his greatest conviction, as a father he imposed laws on me and my older brother. Things had to be tested and proven by the scientific method. Hypotheses and theories could only be true if they were supported, if experience confirmed, if they were part of the collective consciousness and if the most studious and respected scientists confirmed them. As a father he framed us in this way, he took care to keep us away from religious dogmas by imposing another type of dogma. When one spoke of God and spiritual things, he tried to say that there was no God. That one could not prove his existence. He said he was an atheist. When Jehovah's Witnesses came to our house to bring the word, he would come out saying "in this house we are secular communists, so please, I thank you but go somewhere else!".
He was something of a communist, but he called himself a socialist. A secularist for sure.
My mother also shared some of that, she dared to say little or nothing. My dad's logic was irrefutable. And my mother was always right, an extraordinarily intelligent and articulate woman. 
All this generated something in me. On my maternal side, my grandmother was Roman Catholic. Of the pope and the Christian church. Her children had attended religious schools.
So I wondered: What is it to pray? does it work? I try it. It doesn't work. Whatever.
But I prayed again, what do I know?

I don't disown my home and my upbringing. I don't resent my father's laws. It was perfect. I loved to be like that and I loved to change. I discovered God and Christ, I discovered Mother Earth and spirit. I am grateful that my home was this neutral or polarized to another side. It was my soul that needed it to take on the divine search and encounter. I needed it to study and prove to myself that magic exists.

I always had a rebellious spirit, I always wanted to be remembered. I always wanted stories of my courage and daring to be told. As a child and teenager I wanted to be told of my follies, of my mistakes. Remembered for bad and for good. Somehow my clan did the same. I was the crazy one, different, the younger brother, the creative one. I had chosen that place and my family also gave it to me. The stability of my older brother, his sense of responsibility and prudence gave me the fertile ground to be the other one.
So when I was a teenager I created a reputation for myself as crazy, daring, rebellious without a cause, unpredictable, creative for the screw-up. This led me to be a pioneer of substance testing. I drank alcohol at 11 or 12, went out to night clubs at 14, smoked marijuana for the first time at 14. I also tried cocaine at 17 and lysergic acid among other things.

Rebelliousness and substances went hand in hand. Also the same rebelliousness made me stay away from the discos and seek out the streets. We teamed up with school friends who heckled at the back of the class. We explored drugs and alcohol together. We walked the endless streets. We vandalized, we ran. We played with gasoline. We would go into dark neighborhoods.

We also bonded over football and its little matches. We had a team that played and played every weekend. At the same time I was competing in the youth team of the local club.
In my beliefs I named myself an atheist. "I am an Atheist" "God does not exist" and I thought that made my father proud.
In this innocent/not so innocent exploration also on its positive side we turned to nature. We philosophized in the middle of the desert for hours watching the stars. We would take acid walking under the moon in the river. We laughed out loud. We listened to classical music inside a hermetically sealed car filled with pot smoke. Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Charly García, Spinetta, Ravel, Beethoven. We shared poetry, cinema and humor. We played guitars. We swam in the river. Hedonism and nihilism mixed with deep reflections touches of spiritual experiences and always present wonder.

I tied my sanity and decency with football and girlfriend.
At the age of 15 I fell in love with Antonella. We were schoolmates. To this day, 17 years later we are still together and have two children. Antonella my grounding cable. Libra, my balance and equilibrium.
After returning from my university failure in Buenos Aires, we became parents. Young, with no job and no trade, Sofia came. We lived in a small house on a farm in Stefenelli. A year later we moved to another little house, close to where our parents lived.

One day Anto and Sofi, who was 1 year old at the time, went on vacation with my in-laws to Brazil. I think it was two weeks. I didn't want to go, my pride was hurt because I couldn't pay for the trip and I was an adult invited to live an experience I didn't deserve. I had a closed grace and I could not accept the failure of not having a job and not wanting to be a slave.
In that synchronicity coincided that a couple of shamans were coming to town to offer a Huachuma ceremony. The San Pedro cactus. I had heard of ceremonies and master plants, at one time or another I'd trod through Hoffman's and McKenna's books. My acid trips had made me touch strange dimensions of which I saw a potential of self to "realize" things. To ask questions from which there is no return. Plus two of my friends had already been in Huachuma ceremony with the same shamans.

But the real reason I went to that ceremony was that all five of my friends in my group were going to be there. We were all going. That gave me a security and a sense of power. Another drug with the lads! Another night. And I thought it was naughty and naughty to do it while my family was away. For one night I could abandon decency and the role of father. To return to adolescence and meet with the boys. 

I remember the nerves when we went. We knew we were doing something illegal. We met at a traffic circle on Route 22 and there we would find the traveling shamans. When I saw them arrive, the image and first impression of them confirmed the staging of my rebelliousness to the ceremony. Ramon and Aldana, the givers of this medicine, were a young couple. Perhaps a little older than me in age. Or maybe even older but well preserved and youthful. They had some of a shine, unexplicable bright.
I remember them hugging everyone as they greeted each other. Deep, heartfelt hugs. When it was my turn I offered resistance and gave no more than a cold, boundary hug. "You are not like me and I don't even know you, don't even try it with me con man priest!" It was my rebelliousness, my atheism, the traumas of the priests who beat my dad, speaking.
That marked my experience. I had no respect for them. Who were they? Just kids like me who were looking for substances.
The ceremony was interesting. There wasn't much difference in the setting between what happened that night and what happens today, ten years later.

People came, I counted thirty-something souls, did we do a speech circle? I do not remember. Ramón spoke, truthful, in peace, absolute coherence. I listened to him intrigued, he was a different being, he was the leader of that herd and he had the merits. He said things that I don't remember but that were surely in line with medicine. My layers of pride kept no memory of what he said. But I was still struck by those things, his temperance, his voice, his youth, his symbiotic alchemical union with his partner Aldana. The synergy.
It left me itching, I had to rebel, I had to call attention to myself and disrespect, I had to be unpredictable and insightful.  I think my friends felt empowered to do the same, the five of us were very united in those subversions.

I was more or less well behaved until I took the medicine. I played guitar loudly. It bothered me how much they were out of tune, I always had an ear for inharmonicity. It bothered me how rudimentary the songs were. The noise. Still Aldana riding on the Djembe made my rib cage resonate with the beats. And they didn't stop all night long. More than eight hours, no matter what was going on. Bum Bum Bum Bum. For me and my "refined musical taste", the songs sucked, but the drum in my chest, moving the water and life out of every cell. That resonance was a big part of the experience.
At one point we left the circle to smoke doobies and shit ourselves laughing. That's how we did it.

I had no visions other than those of tiny little devils bursting out of me and making me bitch and curse. I recognized that they were not mine and that they just wanted to play. A kind of momentary Tourette's syndrome. I had fun doing it and giving them room. Maybe by not fighting it or repressing it I was able to give them an outlet and peace. It has not happened to me again.
Also I had some curious thoughts I didn’t expected. At dawn I saw the flowers and the sky and the clouds and I thought: “these don’t belong to me”. And as weird as it sounds, I felt really light and something clicked.  “Was I thinking those things belonged to me? I don’t know”. And this “I don’t know” was relieving and clearing. Like I needed it. I needed to not know and let new pathways to create in my mind, out of curiosity and wonder. That clearance stayed with me for months, I would say, if not for ever.

I know we bastardized the ceremony a bit. I know we tried to rebel in various ways, leaving the circle, playing a few passes with the ball. Shouting things out of the dark of night. Wandering around. Today I understand that it is not easy to gather people in a medicine circle. And that it's not good to have those at the back of the class (the teacher is not the shaman but the medicine).

Beyond a rather exacerbated marijuana madness by Huachuma, a lot of laughter and fooling around, that night I felt almost nothing. I didn't feel the spirit of the plant, I didn't know what I had gone there for. Yes, I was really high that night. And the next day I felt peace.

And I do know that it took me many years to understand what Ramón and Aldana were doing. And that behind the off-key recital there was a transcendental intention. That it was bigger than them and their successes and mistakes. A purpose that went through them and chose them for a necessary work.

After that, certain tastes of mine changed, certain preferences, and habits. With processes full of trial and error. Comings and goings. Huachuma, its taste, its sensation had entered me. And this is also difficult to explain. There is "other way". I think Huachumita opened it.

I think I did not understand it but I understood it. I think that paradox can be put together. I did not understand it. But time was glueing me the parts. I was re-membering. Small micro-decisions were falling from the shock wave of that day and time where Huachuma and ceremony moved my blood, and my psyche.

That plant somehow allied with my spirit. That ceremony still beats in my chest. And like a magnet polarized towards the metal I was getting involved in "yes for me". Much more in “yes for me", for my body and soul. Much less "not for me". For my life, my body, my family. I changed my diet, studied many books about master plants and weeds, practices. I meditated, I ran. Little by little I washed away vices and healed brokenness. I think Huachuma gave me a sense of a path that was hidden from me because I didn’t know who I was. Or I knew too much who I was so I had to defend it. So that rigidness of being was misaligning me with truth and the way to create a meaningful life. 

What did Huachuma do and what did I do? Who knows, maybe it was always a negotiation. A letting me do and doing myself. A constant recognition of oneself. Having touched the sky with my hands and coming down to earth to find new ways to do it again. Different ways. Knowing that there is another way. One that reconciles paradoxes.

I do remember that the experience of that first Huachuma I understood not to understand. I conceived that structures and reasons, logics and patterns had been undone. Perhaps for that night I had just lost the sense of the ground and the sky, of good and evil, of soft and hard.

I often say that I “floated” in absurd concepts that have no meaning except in human survival, often outdated even biologically. Concepts of God, entheogen, spirit, path, began to be felt. Beyond logic and explanation, I began to feel them. And if I feel it, it is real. And when I feel it, I begin to see it manifest in life.

It took me 9 years to appreciate and recognize the value of what Ramon and Aldana were doing. It took me 9 years to forgive their lack of musical ear. It took me 9 years to forgive myself for my arrogance and stubbornness, for my lack of respect. I understand that I was still a child, I understand that I still had a lot to understand. Today I breathe and I am grateful. We met several more times with the coolest and most modern shamanic duo in America. Today we embrace and love each other. Today I consider them my father and mother of that path. They inspire me with the courage and rebellion that they also had when they sent themselves to harvest and serve Wachuma without lineage or tradition, against the law of the State. I do not know nor can I imagine other courage and acts of bravery they had. Traveling the country and the continent collecting medicine, words, songs, experiences. Bringing that to this inhospitable corner. 

Last Saturday I was, for the second time, in a Huachuma ceremony with them. Today they tune in a heavenly way. Today the tribe they formed is big, we recognize each other as accomplices in the street. Because we are creating a fabric of harmonious relationships uniting heaven and earth with art and labor. We are co-creating an epic mystical circular and decentralized culture. A historical journey that may not remain in any history book but that will permeate the foundations of the hierarchical pyramids of power and eat the dead as a fungus eats the fallen trunks and branches in the forest. May the incarnated divinity remain, the fruits of the seeds and flowers, as they say. The labors and the works for the coming generations that will be born knowing of “the other path” in their genetic information.
Today the resonance of their songs travels in alignment with the laws of physics. In phase with spiritual planes and with the resonance of air and time. Their songs were embellished, poetry was channeled from the sky and plants. The oral tradition they create and co-create begins to emerge in popular culture. Don't believe me, but I know. You won't understand until you live it. I wish you all the Huachuma experience with Rama and Aldi.  And I'm proud to have been there ten years ago and to still be there. I am proud to be called a friend and to be called "Hermago" by the people who shared the fire with me.