I could say that I was born to witness the two most anticipated dates by esotericists in recent centuries, if it weren't for the fact that human history is full of dates for which great events or planetary transformations had been prophesied. The second coming of Christ was prophesied by different spiritual leaders for the year 500 AD; after failing to materialize, it was updated to the year 800, 1533, 1844, and more recently, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced with greater precision that we would see the redeemer reborn on April 6, 2000.
I, born sandwiched between Generation X and what is now called Millennials, was destined to live through the global anticipation around the millennium change, which — how else — would arrive hand in hand with an unusual number of prophecies, typical of dates with some special numerological quality. The year 2000 was not only the announced date for the second coming of Christ but also the year that various sects around the world anticipated the day of judgment, a planetary alignment that would swallow them in the sun, a shift of Earth's axis, the revelation of the antichrist and World War III[1].
I, by then in the midst of the century change and just starting my new life in Santa Marta, distancing myself from my Christian life and still far removed from the esoteric world, never learned about these prophecies. The only prediction I was fully aware of before the end of 1999 was one about a potential global computer cataclysm, which was supposed to happen at midnight on January 1, 2000 when the millions of computers that used only two digits to represent the year would switch from 99 to 00. It was believed that at that moment, many systems would think they had gone back to 1900 instead of reaching 2000, and all date-based calculations: loan interest, pensions, taxes, and even geolocalization of planes and scheduling of nuclear plants, would become erratic or simply stop working.
Because my first job — and the reason I had to move to Santa Marta, that small town on the Caribbean coast — was as an IT technician at the National Telecommunications Company, one of my first major assignments was to prepare the company's systems for the arrival of the feared year 2000. I participated in national meetings, trainings, seminars, and drills from which I don't remember extracting any concrete corrective action. On that December 31st at night, I had to spend my first New Year's Eve away from my family sitting in front of a computer, running a precarious testing protocol with an emergency contact list just in case the company's computers went crazy.
But midnight arrived on January 1, 2000 and absolutely nothing happened. There were no alarms, no reports of air disasters, no successive blackouts as many experts had prophesied. It turns out that despite displaying the year with only two digits, most systems at the time already stored the actual value with 4 digits, or internally used an integer with decimals to represent the exact date and time. The big news around the world was that Y2K — the name given to the feared phenomenon that never happened — had been another of many apocalyptic events prophesied with firm certainty that ended up as mere promises.
In retrospect, with the sycophantic fatalists silenced by the force of events, the few sensible voices that barely managed to register in the media before now had their microphones and spotlights available for the first time to repeat what they had been saying for years: Y2K was an invention by writers, consultants, and contractors who sought to profit from the legendary fear of exact dates, resorting to exceptional cases of poorly designed computer systems to create global panic and fill the cash register with books, seminars, conferences, and consulting. According to a BBC article, the cost of preparations for the millennium bug approached $300 billion dollars[2].
Years later and already in the midst of my stage of greater fascination with spirituality and esotericism, I was part of the reception committee for the second prophetic date of my life: December 21, 2012.
Entering the spiritual path in Latin America by arriving in 2010 meant participating in an amalgam of knowledge, superstitions, and beliefs that were adding up to what could be called postmodern shamanism of the Andes. Within this urban subculture, which superficially seemed to emulate the hippie movement of the 60s, a common denominator was admiration for indigenous communities as bearers of ancestral wisdom with which we resonated — those of us who were part of the many spiritual movements in the region.
At times, however, these indigenous communities were also idealized as if they were beings with special powers or supernatural knowledge. Many Indigenous people spoke out against this distortion of reality, but some took advantage of the era's thirst for mystical transcendence to spread and promote mystical prophecies, like all those swirling around the end of the Maya long-count calendar.
What I heard from Mara, the Muisca elders, and a great number of personalities from the new age world like Sixto Paz Wells, David Topi, Drunvalo Melchizedek, or David Wilcock was that Earth was about to undergo a cosmic shift — or as others called it, the quantum leap. A large number of spiritual leaders declared that 'it's not that the world was going to end as they're saying,' though I never met anyone who actually believed that. What would happen, they added afterward, was that the planet would go through a unique cosmic event that would lead humanity to a new level of consciousness.
The nature of the cosmic event in question, the definition of 'level of consciousness' and the details about what would happen after the event varied widely, but everyone agreed it would happen on December 21, 2012 — a date that coincided with the last day of a non-cyclic long-count calendar that the Maya created (along with other calendars they used for different purposes), which spanned from the year 3114 BC to that date.
Among the theories I heard during the years leading up to the quantum leap, the most frequent were that a planet called Nibiru and several times larger than Earth would pass near our world, bringing catastrophes and probably the second coming of the biblical Elohim and the Sumerian epics. It was also said that on December 21, 2012, Earth's magnetic axis would reverse, World War III would erupt, Earth would pass through an alleged photon belt, or the extraterrestrians who supposedly inhabited our planet would reveal themselves. As with the year 2000, some believed there would be a planetary alignment in the solar system that would raise the planetary frequency, and others, like the Spanish speaker David Topi, who created an entire pseudoscientific theory with which he managed to sell books and conferences — according to which Earth was experiencing its passage from the third to the fifth dimension...
At that moment, with all the wonderful and mystical things I had experienced and narrated in this book, I set aside much of my skepticism and even common sense and let myself be carried away by the frenzy of 2012. I devoured eagerly every piece of content related to the transformation of 21-12-12 that crossed my path; in word-of-mouth circles and talks at Clan Solar, I shared some of the theories I had read, though I always tried to qualify them with the idea that the change would surely be invisible from a physical standpoint but would happen internally. Often I found myself warning that the quantum leap would only affect those who were prepared for it, so deep down my skepticism kept simmering while my mystical self enjoyed the anticipation of being part of a never-before-seen global mystical event.
Whatever it was that was going to happen, I was convinced that 2012 would be a unique opportunity to bring my consciousness to a new level, so I resolved to intensify my spiritual activities. I promised myself to attend a yagé ceremony once a month, which I imagined would earn me spiritual points by completing 12 doses in the 12 months of year 12. Needless to say, numerology was another pseudoscience that, alongside astrology, reached its peak during the cabalistic year 2012.
But numerical perfection was disrupted because I ended up attending three additional ceremonies that year. Interestingly, those three yagé doses stood out for the atypical and surprising events that happened during them.
The first special yagé dose of 2012 happened on a Sunday in August. Paula and I had received an invitation from Héctor Raúl González, the musician student of taita Gregorio and author of Corazón de Estrella, to join him at a benefit concert where he would participate to raise funds for the inhabitants of the street from the Los Mártires neighborhood in Bogotá.
The initiative seemed lovely to us, but above all the opportunity to reunite with Héctor Raúl and his girlfriend Meigy, whom we deeply cared about, and to enjoy an afternoon of music medicine.
The event offered us more than it promised, since besides Héctor Raúl, there were two other musicians who harmonized the yagé ceremonies and another great surprise: two members of the group Putumayo, which in 2012 Colombian shamanic scene was something like The Beatles in Liverpool's rock scene back in 1960. After the event, we noticed that Héctor Raúl and Meigy still hadn't decided where to spend the night — they both lived in the city of Bucaramanga — so Paula and I quickly offered our apartment.
I greatly admired Héctor Raúl as a musician and as a shaman, and Meigy had always struck us as a very sweet woman, so we were happy to have them with us. We ordered some food to treat them and soon found ourselves 'without plans,' as we say in Colombia. Then, Héctor Raúl looked out the window at the city lights, turned to me and said:
– "Hey brother, shall we do a cocado?"
I looked at him surprised but intrigued and replied:
– "Really? Do you have yagé there?"
– "Of course, I even brewed this yágue myself and it's super cosmic."
The looks crossed among the four of us and soon we went from laughter to anticipation. We had never taken yagé in the city and even less so with someone who wasn't a taita. Meigy noticed Paula's nerves and reassured her by saying that they took at home frequently.
"Besides," she said, "the doses with Raúl are even nicer than with taita."
With that we set aside our fears and I, knowing that taita Grego's yagé was rather mild, asked Héctor Raúl to give me a double portion so I could work it seriously.
Héctor Raúl took out his necklaces, a bottle with the brew, a harmonica, and set about ritualizing the drink with such skill that Paula and I were convinced Meigy was right. The dose led by the young apprentice would be a beautiful experience.
I lay down in a hammock that stretched across the living room and closed my eyes to let myself be carried away by the medicine. Not more than 15 minutes passed when I began to feel a pleasant tingling throughout my body and a pleasurable sensation that grew deeper and deeper. A few minutes later I started perceiving colorful fractals around me and suddenly, emptiness once again. I was no longer lying on a hammock but floating weightless in the middle of a large chamber that I perceived located in outer space.
I felt — because this wasn't sight but certainty — the presence of three monks dressed in purple robes floating beside me and arranging my astral body for the journey. They began transmitting coded messages to my ears, which I heard like the sounds American TV series from the seventies added to computers when processing information. I believe that was the most prolonged experience I ever had of those astral adjustments that frequently happened to me during the first part of the yagé trance. It was so intense that on that occasion, my mind traveled to many times and places while my astral body floated in that space chamber.
I was transported to a temple I identified as a white lodge temple, where several monks dressed in colorful robes with golden diadems watched me in silence. I noticed then that the beats of my heart were entirely discernible and that their rhythm was aligned with a cosmic pulse that transcended time and matter. I kept traveling through many places and everywhere those mysterious monastic presences repeated themselves. But what had begun as a pleasant and peaceful journey turned into a frantic and unsettling rush. Soon my recurring fears of being used by some dark power began assaulting me. I opened my eyes and tried to breathe deeply to bring down the intensity of my trance, but the images kept coming pell-mell.
From there on, my journey began to grow increasingly dark. Diabolical images started appearing and thoughts of death and destruction took hold of my mind. Soon I felt scared enough to set aside embarrassment and got up to ask Héctor Raúl to help me because the journey was 'too intense.'
Héctor Raúl came out of his own trance, sat up and began playing his harmonica and assisting me with songs and tapping with his wayra. The images in my mind lost their narrative thread and turned into fragments of memories from my childhood — memories I don't recognize as my own and macabre scenes worthy of any horror movie.
Then what I had previously perceived as writhing in my belly turned into genuine contractions that ended up expelling multiple mouthfuls of vomit, skillfully directed by Héctor Raúl, Meigy and Paula, who at that hour had gone from being ceremony participants to becoming Raúl's helpers and caretakers of this servant.
As on previous occasions before, as I was vomiting I felt that I was serving as a dimensional doorway through which multiple demons of the Earth were expelled: violations, massacres, child abuse and another quantity of crimes were being expiated by my gastric juices through my mouth and nostrils.
I don't know how long that nightmare lasted but it felt like a couple hours. During that time I went in and out of trances like the one described, vomited, cried, asked for forgiveness, sang or recited verses from the Bible. Héctor Raúl blew tobacco up my nose several times trying to bring me back and I remember that on one of those occasions, I somehow managed to see the tip of the tobacco applicator penetrate my nostril and rest at the entrance of my sinuses. It was as if I had suddenly acquired the ability to see from behind the eyeball. When Héctor Raúl blew through the other end, I saw tobacco dust spread throughout my nasal cavity but its color was golden and shining.
Between the tobacco, the care of my friends and the medicine music that was playing, little by little I emerged from that deplorable state and found myself lying on Héctor Raúl's lap with Paula and Meigy each holding one of my hands.
– Do you love me? I asked them
– Of course we love you. They replied while smiling at me
This is something curious that happened to me several times during yagé doses, particularly the stronger ones: I felt an overwhelming need to know I was loved and also to know that those who cared about me saw me as okay, so it was common for me in doses to find myself like a loony asking everyone if they loved me or if they thought I looked okay.
If there's something I must acknowledge now is that I wasn't always the best ceremony companion, though probably often the most entertaining one.
The final part of that yagé dose was one of the most beautiful moments of my life. After a long ceremony with Paula and those two young people of beautiful hearts, I felt as if we had known each other from many past lives, as if we had battled together in spiritual wars like no one could imagine they might exist. In the early morning everything was peaceful in our apartment and the effect of yagé still lingered but in its most mystical manifestation. It was a group samadhi. At a moment of internal connection with my Being, I heard a voice that said:
"This is your house, this house belongs to yagé and you will be its owner to continue healing here and receiving your little angel here."
So I let Paula know, clarifying — yes — that I imagined the prophecy must refer to being spiritually or something like that, because the apartment belonged to my sister Laura and the father of her son, but we didn't have enough money even to pay half of the down payment it cost. Just as happened with the revelation of my Hindu ancestor, shortly after this prophecy was confirmed when my sister told us she wanted us to keep the apartment and that she would sell it to us with no down payment and we could pay it in whatever way we could. That was a gesture for which we will always be grateful to my sister and an experience that showed us the power of mystical revelations when we activate them from within ourselves.
In the early morning, and already with the effect of yagé much diminished, Héctor Raúl told us he was seeing matrix code — like green beams of light moving in all directions. I, who already felt back to my five senses, could hardly believe it when I started noticing exactly those same beams of light. That was a vision that repeated itself during a couple of subsequent yagé doses, but it was the first and only time I had a shared vision with another person.
Almost at dawn with Paula and our friends lying beside me, we closed our eyes to enjoy a song by Soledad Pastorutti (the same author of Corazón Americano) that Raúl and Meigy shared with us that night. A song that would become for me forever an anthem of friendship but above all a path to transport me back to that magical night:
One of the themes that presented itself to me with the most insistence during 2012 was extraterrestrials. That year I read J.J. Benitez's 'Caballo de Troya' for a second time, which suggested that Jesus Christ was actually an extraterrestrial. I learned about the documentary 'El Plan Cósmico' created by Sixto Paz Wells, personal friend of J.J. Benitez and also a ufologist, who proposed that Earth was something like a cosmic experiment with which the Elhoim or gods — who would actually be highly advanced extraterrestrians — wanted to determine whether it was possible for an intelligent species to achieve connection with the highest levels of being without their direct intervention.
Some Muisca elders had intensified their theories about the connection between native American communities and the lost continents of Atlantis or Mu, and Mara was increasingly convinced that the angels were preparing us for the quantum leap in December.
The peak of ufological frenzy would arrive a couple of months after the yagé dose at our house with Meigy and Héctor Raúl, when Nelson Dorado — another of the musician shamans who accompanied taita Gregorio's doses — invited me to a yagé dose that his master Mauricio Vicencio would hold in a place especially designed to receive the energy of December 21.
Without thinking twice, I accepted Nelson's invitation, first because I completely trusted his recommendation and second because I knew who Mauricio Vicencio was and this was an opportunity not to be missed.
Mauricio is a famous musician, folklorist, luthier, shaman and musicologist from Chile, known in the Andean music scene for being part of the group Altiplano, but also in academic circles for his research on ancestral instruments — a topic on which he's a world authority. The musicians who accompanied taita Gregorio professed a justified admiration for maestro Vicencio and I had heard that his yagé doses were at the same level as his musical quality.
The place chosen for the ceremony was no less impactful. It was Quanutm Shasta, a pyramid-shaped temple made of wood and zinc, about 12 meters on each side and in height. Nelson, with whom I made the journey from Bogotá, told me that at the apex of the construction there was a quartz weighing 5 kg and that the instructions for building the temple had been delivered by extraterrestrians through multiple channelings by a group of ufologists led by someone called Pedro Rodríguez, whom they called 'Doctor Pedro.'
The access to the farm where the imposing pyramid stood was an unpaved road in terrible condition and because of bad weather, our ascent took longer than expected and we arrived after nightfall. The place sat atop a mountain in the municipality of La Mesa, and though it was only about 20 kilometers from the farm where I took yagé for the first time, the temperature was lower due to the altitude difference.
When we arrived, I noticed that probably more than 100 ceremony attendees were listening attentively to an expressive gentleman in his 50s with gray hair. Nelson indicated it was Dr. Pedro. The little I managed to hear of his talk captivated me, since he spoke about a project with which he intended to build near the municipality of Zapatoca, in Santander, the prototype of a futuristic city, with capacity for one million inhabitants, no carbon emissions and entirely powered by renewable energy. According to what he said, the project would be backed by a famous Colombian scientist whom I had never heard of, with the impressive name Magnum Astron.
Not wanting to stray too far from the thread of my story, it's worth making a brief aside to talk about this interesting character. Magnum Astron, whose real name is Hernán Vélez Velásquez — as I found on the Internet — is an Electronic Engineer, Physicist, Inventor and Spiritual Leader from Colombia[3]. When researching the mysterious scientist I found a book of his authorship with the pretentious title 'Spaxium, La Teoría Global del Universo.' I made a copy of the book and read it eagerly. In its more than 500 pages I found a relatively orderly compendium of scientific ideas related to matter, time, space and energy; some of them that struck me as bold and others that I noticed were rather compilations of theories already discarded by traditional science.
He proposed things like atoms don't exist but are bundles of energy vibrating at different frequencies, that they coil and manifest as matter in three-dimensional reality, before declaring that space is not empty but a perfect solid in which all that exists are vibrations.
Despite the fact that at that time my knowledge of quantum physics and
astrophysics was even more scant than what I have now, it struck me as suspicious that all those so revolutionary theories lacked even a single equation or mathematical formula. Of course there were no references to scientific experiments nor academic publications but what there was in abundance were criticisms of traditional science for its myopia, for lack of creativity or for being unable to deduce what Astron unraveled with astonishing ease.
My reservations about the author of Spaxium, who regardless could be considered a good science fiction writer, were confirmed when I found the only evidence of his scientific experiments. One of the postulates of his 'general theory of the universe,' the same one that eluded Albert Einstein's mind, was counter-gravity. According to Spaxium:
"Counter-gravity refers to the same force of gravity but from an opposite angle. When this case presents itself, gravity is entirely counteracted at the crossing point, or its effect is diminished near the meeting of spatial pressures out of phase."
To prove his theory, Magnum Astron built in Zapatoca an obelisk about 10 meters long, apparently supported by a vertex and tilted at 45 degrees on the ground. A construction that according to his website defies terrestrial physics and engineering. Beside the obelisk, according to Astron you can experiment with antigravity thanks to the counter-gravitational effect present in the place and responsible for the 'miraculous' shape of the obelisk[4]. As evidence of the above, Magnum himself photographed levitating above the ground. The reader may judge for themselves:
He proposed things like atoms don't exist but are bundles of energy vibrating at different frequencies, that they coil and manifest as matter in three-dimensional reality, before declaring that space is not empty but a perfect solid in which all that exists are vibrations.
Despite the fact that at that time my knowledge of quantum physics and
astrophysics was even more scant than what I have now, it struck me as suspicious that all those so revolutionary theories lacked even a single equation or mathematical formula. Of course there were no references to scientific experiments nor academic publications but what there was in abundance were criticisms of traditional science for its myopia, for lack of creativity or for being unable to deduce what Astron unraveled with astonishing ease.
My reservations about the author of Spaxium, who regardless could be considered a good science fiction writer, were confirmed when I found the only evidence of his scientific experiments. One of the postulates of his 'general theory of the universe,' the same one that eluded Albert Einstein's mind, was counter-gravity. According to Spaxium:
"Counter-gravity refers to the same force of gravity but from an opposite angle. When this case presents itself, gravity is entirely counteracted at the crossing point, or its effect is diminished near the meeting of spatial pressures out of phase."
To prove his theory, Magnum Astron built in Zapatoca an obelisk about 10 meters long, apparently supported by a vertex and tilted at 45 degrees on the ground. A construction that according to his website defies terrestrial physics and engineering. Beside the obelisk, according to Astron you can experiment with antigravity thanks to the counter-gravitational effect present in the place and responsible for the 'miraculous' shape of the obelisk[4]. As evidence of the above, Magnum himself photographed levitating above the ground. The reader may judge for themselves:
I never heard from Magnum Astron again and his web pages disappeared from the Internet. Of whom I did get news was Doctor Pedro, who offered — to taita Gregorio and as far as I know still hasn't delivered — that he would give him an infinite source of electrical energy for his farm in Putumayo, which wouldn't require solar power or any kind of wiring, just a couple of crystals that the extraterrestrians had given him along with the design of the artifact.
Back to the pyramid at La Mesa... The yagé ceremony began, naturally, with the shamanic music of Maestro Mauricio Vicencio. I took my portion of yagé and retired to my mattress waiting for my entheogenic journey to begin. An hour passed and since I still wasn't feeling the effect of yagé, I decided to get closer to the fire, which burned in the middle of the temple, right beneath the enormous quartz suspended below the tip of the pyramid.
I observed the quartz for a moment and then focused on the fire. I did my breathing exercises and let myself be carried away by the crackling of the flames until my meditation was interrupted by a voice I heard over my left shoulder:
I turned my head quickly but saw no one. I wasn't feeling dizzy from yagé nor any other symptom of altered consciousness. I waited a while longer for my journey to begin or for another message, but since nothing came, I decided — despite my reservations about taking a second dose — to ask maestro Vicencio to give me just a little more.
When the shaman heard me say his yagé hadn't affected me, he looked at me disapprovingly and said:
– "That's very unusual because my yagé is very strong."
Then he took out a medium-sized jar containing something that looked like propolis, opened it, scooped a spoonful and offered it to me to eat. I had never seen solid yagé before but without thinking twice, I sucked the spoon, swallowed the yagé honey and returned to my spot. I was about to lie down again but I thought I might connect much better if I went outside the pyramid, closer to nature.
It will come as no surprise to the reader that the second dose of yagé — just as had happened to me on multiple occasions before — launched me onto a psychedelic rollercoaster of mystical images, astral places, demons, jungle animals and repressed feelings of guilt. Once again I found myself asking for help and struggling so yagé wouldn't hit me too hard. I didn't see Nelson anywhere but fortunately I ran into another great friend close to taita Gregorio: Maiker Villa, whom I admired for his discipline on the shamanic path and his seriousness. He dedicated a good amount of time to me, accompanying me with tobacco, helping me vomit, holding me so I could walk and breathe better. I don't remember many of his words but I know he told me that he saw great strength in me and that what I was doing in yagé was service for humanity so I should feel proud.
I thanked him for his help and Maiker left when I told him I felt better. I lay down on the grass and lost consciousness for a while. I don't remember if I had visions, dreams or introspection but I remember starting to hear a wind instrument around me that activated every cell of my body. My legs and arms began moving on their own and they made me stand up with a jolt. I started dancing and little by little I opened my eyes and realized that Mauricio Vicencio himself was standing in front of me playing an unusual flute. When he finished playing, I fell back to the ground and kept staring at the enigmatic shaman with large hands, long hair and thick beard. He didn't seem human but rather more like a troll — one of those mythical guardians of the earth. He looked at me with what I judged as disappointment and said:
– "If you see, a shaman can't be lying there on the ground turned to nothing. A shaman has to stand firm like a warrior. You have to pay attention to the medicine, because this isn't a game. The medicine gives much but it also demands and you have to be respectful."
With that he left and I stayed there with my ego more bruised than the white garments I had worn that day. The maestro's words resonated so deeply in my memory that they still echo in my head, though I didn't know then how prophetic they would turn out to be regarding the events I would experience three years later.
As soon as I could I got up and sat with my head between my knees. Drowsy and on the threshold between trance and reality I heard my friend Héctor Raúl arrive; he sat beside me, put his hand on my shoulder and said:
– "Manito, how are you? Don't worry about what the maestro told you, we're all here learning and you're doing a beautiful path. We're all accompanying you.
I put my hand over his and without looking at him I said:
– "Thank you Raulito, thank you for being here with me again."
It would have been nothing more than another anecdote about the camaraderie that lives on the shamanic path if it weren't because Héctor Raúl at that hour was 400 km away in his house in Bucaramanga and not at the Quantum Shasta pyramid.
I never knew whether it was someone else I mistook for Héctor Raúl or if the encounter happened only in my mind. I just know it felt as real to me as what had happened a few months earlier during the yagé dose at my house. With that mysterious encounter I discovered something wonderful: that when we have someone in our hearts, we can hear them even when they're not there. When we know the essence of a person, we can invoke their presence. From that night on, I've used that power to receive advice from my elders, my godfather Diego, my friends Jasir, Jhonson and Luis Roberto who passed too soon, and to embrace them whenever I want.
As if that weren't enough, before dawn I heard the voice of Ishtar once again, which this time said:
– "We are preparing humanity for the great transformation. First we must adjust the way of feeling."
When I returned to Bogotá, I looked like a hippie living on the street, but I had experienced one of the strangest, most fascinating and educational experiences of my life.
On November 15, 2012 it marked 3 years since that yagé dose in which Paula and I kissed for the first time. We both decided we would celebrate our anniversary on that day and not the day we married by the rite of the Aseguranza de la Sierra Nevada, nor the day we married civilly, if we ever did. Being a number we considered lucky, we planned a special trip. We would visit my beloved Santa Marta and there, specifically to see Gabriel, my best friend.
When grandfather Suagagua, with whom I still maintained a certain friendship, learned we were planning to visit the Sierra Nevada, he gave me the number of a friend of his who, according to him, knew the most sacred place in the Sierra — something that Indigenous people in the area called 'The Ear of the World.'
Paula and I made a reservation at a beautiful hostal we found on the Internet, in the town of Minca, which is the first urban center you reach ascending the Sierra Nevada. The place was called 'La Casa de la Luna' and it's perhaps the most paradisiacal lodging where I've spent the night. From the shower you could see the city of Santa Marta and its majestic Bay.
When we arrived at the place, I called grandfather Suagagua's friend by phone. His name was Juan Diego and when he heard I came on the grandfather's recommendation he was pleased and told us to prepare for a ceremony at the ear of the world. He said we had to bring fruits, honey, flowers and sugar. A couple of hours later, Juan Diego picked us up in front of the hostal and we went walking through wet forest, swamps and streams.
Finally, we arrived at a beautiful pool of crystalline water over which fell a small waterfall. In that place we left the fruits we carried, poured in the sugar and handed over the flowers. We also offered some tobaccos we had brought and some coca leaves. After enjoying the beauty and tranquility of the surroundings for a while, Paula and I moved toward the point where the rocks took on the shape of an ear, where — as Juan Diego told us — Mother Earth listens to what her children say to her. We held hands and looked into each other's eyes and smiled because we both knew the only thing we wanted to ask: that our little angel come soon. Aside from that, we had only words of gratitude for all the blessings we had received. We knew there was still some path left to travel but we did want to welcome soon that luminous and cheerful being we had seen during our first yagé dose together three years earlier.
When we returned to the hostal, Juan Diego said his goodbyes and never came back again. I tried calling him a couple of times but on his phone number an automated machine answered saying the line was out of service. Later grandfather Suagagua confessed to us that Juan Diego was a secret agent who worked for the CIA or the American Embassy and that probably his real name wasn't even Juan Diego. However, we will always remember the pleasant friend who accompanied us to whisper to the Sierra Nevada that we wanted our little angel soon.
At the hostal we met a nice lady named Emilce. We soon became friendly with her and she told us she practiced mediumship. According to what she said, a couple of days before she had received a message from her older brothers — the name she gave to the extraterrestrial entities she channeled — that she would meet some visitors with whom she would perform important work.
In the middle of conversation, which stretched over several hours, we shared the many theories we had about the planetary frequency shift of the approaching December 21. One of the theories I liked most at the time was David Topi's, about the global consciousness network — an alleged energetic mesh that surrounded Earth, to which — according to the Spanish author — those of us working for the light had to connect in order to restore the ancestral connection with the higher hierarchies of the cosmos that wars, hatred and television had corroded over the last decades.
Hearing this, Emilce concluded that our task that November night, in a small town on the Sierra Nevada, was to unite our energies and direct them toward that network of consciousness to reassemble it and ensure it was ready before December 21. We lit our tobacco, insufflated hoska and performed ceremony as we had learned with the Muisca and Clan Solar, cleansing with words and asking through payment.
2012, after all, had proven to be a year full of mystical and spiritual surprises. Despite my occasional skepticism, I was convinced something would happen on December 21 and for that reason I got very excited when I received yet another invitation to the Quantum Shasta pyramid temple. There was no better place to receive what we called 'the energy of 21-12-12.' I still believed the most likely outcome was that the change would be gradual and internal, but I didn't rule out that something special might happen on the 21st and I didn't entirely rule out that such something could be a transcendent event. So to be safe, I convinced my entire family to participate in the December 21 ceremony at Quantum Shasta.
My parents, who had gradually opened themselves up to my shamanic activities, thought it might be an interesting opportunity; besides they were curious to see the place — after all what I told them about my dose with Mauricio Vicencio.
So my parents, Paula, my daughter Ana María and I headed to La Mesa where we met several spiritual friends. The yagé ceremony would be led by an elder I had met that day but whose name I had heard several times before. It was an elder who had belonged to Pueblo Nación Muisca-Chibcha but had withdrawn before my entry into the community. An elder with white hair and European features whom I had heard my friend Nelson say was the wisest person he knew. His name was Juver Osorio.
Grandfather Juver thus became the fourth person from whom I have received yagé in my life, after taita Fernando, abuela Angélica from the Amazon and taita Gregorio. His words were indeed captivating and intelligent to me but his yagé seemed unremarkable to me. No one in my family felt its effects and I didn't even vomit. This had a reason for it, but more on that later. For now, suffice it to say that I missed the experience of a psychotropic journey — something I imagined would be magical since it was December 21, 2012.
But the night held other surprises in store for me, and it turned out much better to have been fully alert. Since many more people were expected at the ceremony than the pyramid could accommodate, we had been warned to bring a tent — which we did. So after receiving our yagé, since it was drizzling, my family and I shut ourselves inside the tent where after a while everyone ended up falling asleep.
December 21 passed without any news other than the drizzle and more cold than we expected. But around 3:00 in the morning, I woke to the sound of whispering outside the tent. I heard someone say something like 'Look, look, there goes another!' and someone else replying 'Yes, yes, yes, how awesome, uff.'
I decided to go out to satisfy my curiosity and found about 10 or 15 people staring fixedly upward. The night was now completely clear, no moon and the sky full of stars. I lay down near the tent and indeed, I could see the sky behaving in a way I had never seen it, nor have I since.
Some stars moved in circles, others advanced rapidly only to return abruptly. A static red light in the sky flickered for a while then went dark and suddenly another little star traversed the sky at high speed.
Surely some of those 'little stars' could have been the International Space Station, another a weather balloon and although in 2012 remote-controlled drones weren't yet visible like they were years later, it's not unlikely that some more lights belonged to an artifact of that type. But as I said before, I had never seen — nor have I since — such a quantity of atypical lights on a single night.
It is also true that very rarely do I stop to observe the sky for so long and in very few places can one have a sky as clear and star-filled as that night on that mountain in La Mesa.
Aside from that there were no telepathic messages, nor energetic manifestations nor other events out of the ordinary. In the morning before departing back to Bogotá, I sat for a while longer listening to grandfather Juver and his academic and didactic way of speaking about the mysteries of the soul. I didn't have enough time to keep listening but I knew I had found a new master — someone who seemed to know secrets that I would still have the opportunity to unravel. December 13, 2012 was a day like any other and in retrospect, 2012 was another year like 2000, which many used to trade on fear and the need for transcendence and prominence that human beings possess. However, I had decided that 2012 would be a year of spiritual transformation and it was. With 14 yagé doses, new masters, friends and experiences, the Manuel who had been from my encounter with the remedy in 2009 through 2012 would be very different from who I became starting in 2013. Just as the Maya had foretold, only one calendar ended and another began.
[1] List of dates predicted for apocalyptic events — Wikipedia
[2] BBC News | TALKING POINT | Y2K: Overhyped and oversold?
[3] Magnum Astron | Solar Cooking | Fandom