Things in my life were going very well. My relationship with Paula continued to grow stronger, and despite our differences regarding how to walk the spiritual path, she supported me in my intense quest for knowledge with the Muisca and had become an invaluable help in raising my daughter Ana María, who at the time was entering the difficult stage of preadolescence.
Paula occasionally accompanied me to my activities with the Muisca community, and during 2010 she came with me to take yagé in La Mesa a couple of times. For Paula, a couple of sessions a year was enough, since the experience always left her physically exhausted, and above all because she felt she had already managed to “vomit out” many of her fears and burdens from the past.
I, for my part, was increasingly fascinated with the visions, the revelations, and the answers that yagé gave me in every ceremony. At every session I attended, I delighted in the visions of beings from other dimensions, the “pinta,” or kaleidoscopic visions that formed in the sky, in the grass, or among the lush fruit trees of the farm, and other experiences.
I knew that at every session I would eventually have to experience something unpleasant. Sometimes it was a sad childhood memory, confronting an old fear anchored in the subconscious, but other times it was visions of humanity's evil. These latter ones tended to be the most shocking for me, since, as I recounted at the beginning of this book, humanity's capacity for evil and for inflicting pain on others has always filled me with great apprehension.
During one ceremony, for example, yagé made me feel the terror that the victims of the El Salado massacre must have felt when they were about to be murdered by the paramilitary commandos of the AUC in Los Montes de María in February 2000. It was a terrible episode of state violence in Colombia, carried out by the far right in its campaign of terror against the guerrillas in the Colombian Caribbean.
On that fateful day, a group of some 450 men belonging to the Norte and Héroes de los Montes de María blocs of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, under the command of alias ‘Jorge 40’ and alias ‘Cadena’, stormed into the small avocado-growing town of El Salado. After sealing off the exits of the town, the criminals forced all the inhabitants to gather in the main square, in front of the church.
The paramilitaries, claiming the townspeople were active members or collaborators of the guerrilla, carried out a horrifying massacre that lasted at least a week. During the days and nights the nightmare lasted, the men of ‘Jorge 40’ tortured, raped, beheaded, and dismembered more than 100 people. It is believed to have been the worst massacre in the history of Colombia's armed conflict, and without a doubt one of the most diabolical events ever to take place on the continent.
The monstrosity of those events comes not only from the number of victims, but from the cruelty and virulence of the attackers. During those infamous days, the killers played music at full volume while they slit throats and dismembered bodies, played soccer with the heads of their victims, and laughed out loud at the pleas for mercy of the terrified inhabitants of El Salado.
The El Salado massacre marked the deepest point of depravity of the absurd Colombian war. No longer was the enemy simply killed to get rid of them; they reveled in the suffering of their victims and evidently found pleasure in sowing terror and ending the lives of innocent people in the most atrocious ways possible.
In the extensive record of infamies committed by humanity, it is not hard to find senseless acts of violence. However, in the darkest episodes of our history, such as the world wars, genocides, revolutions, and conquests, killing seems to be a practical resource, exercised to eliminate or dominate the adversary group. For all their perversity, the conquistadors, Stalin, Hitler, and Milosevic showed total apathy toward the lives of their victims, but I have found no evidence that they enjoyed killing the way the Colombian paramilitaries did — and, on a smaller scale, still do.
The story of El Salado made me nauseous when I read it in one of the most widely circulated magazines in Colombia, but it was during one of those first yagé sessions I took part in at La Mesa that I was able to grasp the individual human tragedy those hundreds of peasants must have lived through in what must have been one of the worst hells one can experience on Earth.
In the middle of my trance, I found myself in the body of a young woman of about 14, standing in the middle of El Salado's soccer field. During the minutes the experience lasted, which felt like an eternity, that time passed while my whole body trembled and I could only see my hands with interlaced fingers and my long brown hair falling over them.
In the background I heard the rattle of rifle fire, the monstrous laughter of the killers, and the horrifying screams of terror of the other victims. In my mind there was nothing but panic and the desire to disappear from that place and reappear anywhere else. The certainty of death, preceded by who knows how many unspeakable sufferings, surged from my mind like acid about to dissolve existence itself.
It wasn't long before I, back in my real body, opened my eyes terrified by that terrible vision and got up as quickly as I could from where I was, grateful for having been able to come out of such a traumatic vision and feeling enormous pain and respect for the lives and suffering of all those who, undeservedly, lived through that living hell.
That day I also felt great admiration for the social and community leaders who have been working ever since to heal that open wound in Colombia's history. I also asked the Universe to place in my path the tools to help, from my skills and possibilities, fight against the suffering that weighed on my country.
Given my background in technology and my lack of involvement with social issues, I thought I could carry out my mission of service with the people within my reach. Human beings are interconnected and form social and emotional networks. Therefore, if I could bring the message of the yagé medicine and the knowledge of spirituality to the people in my social and family circles, perhaps the message would spread little by little and someday reach the people and groups who most need to heal their souls, to free Colombia from that thirst for blood and suffering.
It was, in any case, the little I was willing to do without having to set aside the tranquility of my daily life, but I would try to do it in the best way possible. And so I became an evangelist of the ancestral medicine and a promoter of spirituality. I always enjoyed narrating my personal experience with the medicine and spirituality, and the way yagé had changed my life.
The people who listened to me, usually friends and family, would ask questions that revealed their interest in getting to know yagé, or sometimes they would directly tell me they wanted to take part in a ceremony someday. I shared with them my view of the way yagé operates in the brain, as well as its ancestral mystical side, increasingly influenced by the knowledge I was acquiring alongside the Muisca elders.
I began sending people to the yagé ceremonies at La Mesa, but not before explaining to them everything I knew and giving them recommendations to make the most of the yagé experience. Usually, whenever I went to a ceremony, I would bring one or two people who were going to receive the remedy for the first time. I noticed that my way of talking about yagé and spirituality had a mystical, motivating tone, similar to the one that was beginning to prevail in the coaching world, thanks to the influence of Tony Robbins and Wayne Dyer.
To tell the truth, I felt quite comfortable with my new facet of spiritual coach and ambassador of yagé, and I began to style myself as such, wearing white robes, colored bracelets, and necklaces, and eventually making the decision to let my hair grow. All of this was also a way of externalizing my inner transformation and empowering myself more and more in what I felt was my true vocation of service: helping others who, like me, were looking for a foothold in the darkness, so that they might find a path in spirituality and, in yagé, a light to walk it.
At every yagé session I brought new attendees to, I tried to keep an eye on my guests and offer them some help, although according to taita Fernando's policies, only he and his official helpers could intervene during the five or six hours the ceremony lasted.
After some four or five ceremonies, I felt I had found my comfort zone: I talked about yagé in the city and brought friends, family, and acquaintances to La Mesa, where I would take the opportunity to have a new encounter with my millennial teacher.
Despite difficult experiences such as the one I recounted about the vision of the girl who was a victim of the El Salado massacre, I considered that I had already learned to “handle” yagé, and that yagé was especially magnanimous with me: it healed me, gave me visions, and allowed me to help other people.
On several occasions, during the ceremonies, I felt that I somehow had the power to help the people I had invited. I would watch them from a certain distance and begin to feel negative thoughts, fear, confusion, nausea, or other sensations, and I would begin to “fight” internally, as I had learned to do that afternoon during my first session, when I had to pull from my body a stubborn demon that resisted leaving it.
Perhaps it was this fixation on helping others that made me begin to have, also under the effect of yagé, occasional experiences related to sacrifice for others. On one occasion, for example, I felt a voice asking me whether I was willing to give my life to help humanity. That was another time I opened my eyes immediately with my heart racing. I remember making a kind of prayer and answering that inner voice that I did not want to have to die for anyone, but that I would do everything possible to help, in life, every person I could.
Around that time I had another similar experience, but in it there was no voice, only again the sensation of being in another body. In this case, I was dying, hanging from a cross, and I felt the sun burning my face. The blood coming from a crown of thorns on my forehead rolled down my cheeks, and the only things going through my mind were prayers to God asking for mercy for humanity, for its ignorance and unconsciousness.
The question of sacrifice for others became a recurring theme in my entheogenic journeys, and little by little I began to put up strong resistance to that possibility. Every time I felt that call, I felt the urge to assert my own will and not accept any kind of pact in which I would have to give my blood or my life to help strangers. After all, if we accept the validity of the biblical text, Jesus Christ gave his life, and it can hardly be argued that his sacrifice freed the world from evil.
Even so, I felt willing and strong enough to help my family and friends get through their psychedelic purgatories, with a few rolls in the grass and a couple of mouthfuls of vomit. And so, in 2011, I organized another trip to La Mesa to meet the sacred yagé and take some friends to their first encounter with the Master.
It would also be a very special occasion, because Adriana, a great friend from my work, Tania, my dear cousin I spoke about in the episode about my childhood, and Gabriel, my friend of heartbreaks and cannabis gatherings whom I mentioned in the Episodes “Macondo” and “Sierra Nevada”, would be attending the ceremony.
Three people very close to my heart and in urgent need of healing in their lives, and I was there to guide and accompany them through their experience. My goal was for them to find the answers and healing they were seeking, and to help them avoid having to go through a trance as intense as the one I had had to live through in my first session.
In particular, I was worried about Gabriel's situation. He was going through serious health problems caused by a cervical injury he had suffered years before. On top of that, he had money problems, disagreements with his eldest daughter, his ex-wife, and other matters. To make matters worse, Mara had seen him in consultation and had diagnosed him with a witchcraft work, similar to the one I had freed myself from a year and a half earlier.
The ceremony began at 10 in the morning as usual. I withdrew to the lower part of the farm, where I felt most at ease, since it was the place where I had had my awakening. Adriana, Tania, and Gabriel settled in other parts of the farm, and so each of us began to live our own process with the elemental.
I have already told how, usually in the first minutes after beginning to feel the effects of the ayahuasca, I had visions of beings from other dimensions that prepared my physical and energetic body for the journey. Most of the time, I knew the journey was about to begin because I started to hear a kind of mantra that sounded something like an endless cow's moo: “Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm”. On this occasion, however, something different and surprising happened to me.
About thirty minutes had already passed since I ingested the yagé and I still felt no effect. No dizziness, no visions, no moos, no alteration of consciousness. Nothing at all. Suddenly, a white object caught my attention in the right periphery of my vision. I turned my head to see more clearly and was able to see with total clarity, with exactly the same level of realism as the trees or the people who were there, a white calf lying on the grass.
I would have thought it was an animal from the farm or from a neighboring farm, despite never having seen cattle there before, had it not been that the calf wore a great many gold necklaces with precious stones hanging from its neck. It also wore headdresses of precious stones on its forehead and, above all, a majestic presence. Some years later I came across the same calf in front of me in the form of a stone statue, at the British Museum in London. Imagine my surprise when I saw it in the section of pieces from India. Its name: Nandi, one of the avatars of the Hindu god Shiva, that resplendent Being with grayish-blue skin that I saw in the Garden of yellow flowers that I described in the Episode “Paula”.
The vision of Nandi lasted almost a minute, long enough to look all around and confirm that I was fully awake, and to try to find an explanation for the vision I was having in front of me. However, just as I was thinking of getting up to ask other people whether they could see the white calf, my eyes turned upward and I let myself fall into one of the most beautiful mystical preparations for yagé I have ever experienced. This time there were no angelic beings, but animal spirits cleaning me from the inside out. In my stomach, a feathered serpent spun, rose up my esophagus to my throat, and descended again. The sensation was impressive but very pleasant.
Then, little by little, I began to enter a deep silence in which there were no thoughts or sensations. I was not asleep, because I heard everything around me, but I did not dream or participate in any way in what I perceived. It was simply presence.
The noise of the mind eventually returned, and I got up from the floor with the feeling that my yagé trance had been too short, that I needed to explore more, to go deeper. I noticed Gabriel was walking casually near where I was, so I greeted him:
– “So, buddy, how did it go? Did the yagé hit you?”
– “Nothing, Manuelito, I'm like nothing happened. I've already had like three cups of that stuff and it doesn't even tickle.”
– “Really? How weird! And what does the taita say?”
– “He tells me to drink again, but I think I'll pass. That crap tastes really bad...”
I was deeply sorry that Gabriel turned out to be one of the few people who feel no effect from the hallucinogen. It also puzzled me, because when we had our gatherings with marijuana, he always showed the effects of cannabis on his body, from uncontrollable laughter to altered consciousness.
I tried to console him by telling him that in any case the yagé was already inside him and would help him heal whatever needed healing. Though to tell the truth, I don't know if I believed what I was saying myself. I always thought the value of yagé lay in the possibility of entering its astral world of symbols, jungle, and magic.
I returned to the maloca and asked the taita to give me another dose of yagé. Fernando took a small gourd, poured the brown brew into it from a plastic pitcher, and began to sing, blow, and conjure with the vessel near his mouth. Then he held it out to me, and I took it, as always, trying to perceive as little as possible of its repulsive aroma and taste.
I walked away from the maloca, but this time I decided to go to the upper part of the farm instead of the lower part. On the way, I looked for my cousin Tania and Adriana and noticed they were doing fine. Tania was lying down, covered with a sheet, and Adriana was sitting with a thoughtful expression near a tree.
Reassured that my guests were well, I proceeded to meditate to try to quickly reach a state of introspection. I began to feel the dizziness that precedes vomiting, but also a sensation I had never experienced before. It was a kind of anguish or unease I could not explain.
I got up and began to walk to try to relax and clear my thoughts, but they started to become noticeably darker and more unsettling:
– “What if today really is the day I have to die?”
– “I'm alone, I don't like being alone because the darkness traps me”
– “Don't fight it, you know your destiny is to awaken the demon”
With that last thought, I opened my eyes wide, as usual when a negative vision overwhelmed me. Then I realized that somehow I had gotten into a hammock that was strung between two trees. I looked around and everything seemed strange, alien, hostile. My heart beat hard, and little by little I began to feel the same level of anguish I had felt in my first yagé ceremony, before my liberation began.
I tried to control myself as much as I could, but I was already in a panic; at any moment I was going to start screaming. At that point my thoughts were a torrent without direction or meaning. I thought I was going insane. I noticed that several people were moving away from me, and I could see in their faces the hatred they felt for me. They were leaving me alone... Alone so that the demon could take hold of me, so that it could summon evil.
Then I shouted at them with all my strength, or at least that's how it felt:
– “Where are you going? Why are you leaving me alone?”
They looked at me with contempt, said nothing, and walked away.
I got out of the hammock taking deep gulps of air, trying to bring some order to my thoughts, but every attempt was in vain. Thoughts of death, evil, and fear crowded my delirious mind. I began to walk with no fixed destination while fighting with all my strength to regain control of my mind, to drive away those grotesque and diabolical images crossing through it.
Suddenly I began to growl and curl my lips upward as if wanting to bare my teeth. I felt myself deforming and taking on the appearance of a demon with goat legs, hooves instead of hands and feet, and straight horns on my head. My inner self screamed from the depths of my consciousness asking for help, but my mouth made no sound. I felt I was dying, only to be reborn moments later as a grotesque being that was not human, that was pure evil.
Eventually, thoughts of murders, rapes, and other horrible things became prevalent. I learned later that, right at that moment, both Adriana and Tania began to experience feelings of unease and darkness. Tania told me it was as if the whole sky had been covered with black clouds and a strange fear had invaded her.
Meanwhile, I kept wavering between madness and panic. Images of satanic rituals, murders, and tortures played out in my mind. On one hand, I was terrified, but on the other, I enjoyed watching those scenes. At that point I began to scream for help, though in a horrifying way. I shouted that I needed blood, that I wanted to kill. Suddenly I would ask for help and beg them not to let me die.
At the darkest point of that traumatic experience, I asked them to kill an animal and bathe me in its blood. I seem to remember that, in my deranged mind, the image of being covered in blood seemed comforting to me; I thought it would give me peace, at least for a while.
Soon Fernando and his helpers came to my aid. They blew tobacco smoke on me and sprayed me with liquor infused with herbs, pursing their lips to atomize the liquid.
For me, all that accumulated evil, that thirst for blood, that urge to kill, had become a sentence. One striking thing about yagé is that, under its influence, the perception of time becomes distorted. It is possible to perceive a few minutes as if they had been hours, or a yagé ceremony as if several years had passed. On that occasion, I felt I had been enduring that suffering for all eternity. It may not seem logical to have that sensation, since we humans never experience anything remotely close to eternity, but the truth is that for me it was a certainty. I could remember the creation of the Earth and the birth of humanity while I was there trying to contain all that evil so that Adam and Eve could be created.
The evil eventually turned into loneliness, and although one might think that was an improvement over my previous state, the truth is that for me it was 100 times worse. What I felt was not physical loneliness, nor even emotional. It was a loneliness of the soul. I felt a total absence of love, of purpose, a total absence of God.
The only way I can explain that loneliness is that I felt my soul was burning. I know it is hard to imagine how the soul feels, but for me it was completely clear: the absence of God, not being able to stand in His Presence, consumes the soul in eternal flames. The pain was so intense that I knew not even death could put an end to it.
That lasted all eternity, that much is clear. But that was not my evil or my loneliness; it was the evil and loneliness of all humanity. It was the archetype of darkness that had taken possession of my body, and there seemed to be nothing and no one that could redeem me. It was all so unfair. Why me? Had the Father created me only to suffer in my own flesh all the rottenness of a humanity that does not know how to live? Why had He left me alone?
I don't know how long I spent feeling sorry for myself, blaming God for so much suffering and drowning in that loneliness, but the truth is that at some point I stopped thinking about myself and began to think about the pain of all the other souls burning beside me. I don't know if my mind invented it, but I connected with each of those wretched souls and, from my own suffering, tried to console them. In doing so, I could see their stories: the abandonment, the heartbreak, the rage, the fear.
Each soul I approached made me forget my own suffering for a moment. I felt I was telling them to stop searching for God, that God did not exist, that the only thing that existed was suffering, and that, if there was a God, He was never going to come down to hell to rescue us. The overwhelming loneliness of hell began to transform into mercy. I felt the loneliness of the other souls as my own, but I felt it in a different way, because it was no longer only my suffering; there I was, next to someone who perhaps suffered more than I did, and then a flash of a higher feeling appeared, born from mercy, and it was Love.
The moment I was able to feel Love for those souls burning in flames, the pain began to dissolve. Then I could remember my friends who were at the ceremony: Adriana, Tania, Gabriel. I vaguely recognized them in some of the souls with whom we now accompanied one another, and I felt an infinite love for them. Other members of my family were also there, along with people unknown to me until then.
The flames went out, the loneliness disappeared, and evil seemed trivial to me. I opened my eyes and looked at the sky, which was now a different sky from the one I had seen before. It was MY sky. I looked around and saw that everything I had created was good and fulfilled its purpose. I breathed deeply, slowly, and my consciousness traveled through every cell of my body. I know it sounds completely crazy, but I could see each cell individually. I raised my gaze and saw the people around me. I instantly knew the story of each one of them, of their ancestors, and of their children.
A middle-aged man lying face down in front of me looked at me with curiosity, calling me with his eyes. I approached him slowly, knelt down, and stroked his hair. I don't remember exactly what I said to him, but it was something like:
– “God is with you, son. I will not abandon you. I am the source of eternal water that never runs dry. Whenever you feel you have no strength left, come to me and I will give it back to you.”
The man began to cry after I finished saying these words to him. With both hands he took mine and said:
– “Thank you, Father, thank you”
I got up and continued on my way, smiling at the other ceremony attendees, feeling the most sublime sensation of love and happiness I had ever experienced in my life. Even greater than the samadhi I had in my first yagé session. I headed again to the lower part of the farm while I dialogued with myself and revealed to myself secrets of life, the Universe, and existence, of which I only remember a few: the Universe has been created and destroyed an infinite number of times. I saw the beginning of everything, when a primordial masculine force joined with a latent feminine force and they exploded in an orgasm that gave rise to the galaxies, stars, and planets. Then I saw how everything created contracted again to return to the origin, and that this cycle, like the beating of a cosmic heart, repeats with each creation.
I reached my destination in the lower part of the farm, sat down in the lotus position, and continued exploring my cosmic revelations. I saw that only one Universal consciousness exists, and that every living being in the Universe is simply an individual expression of that divine consciousness. In the state of consciousness I was in, I was able to ascend the different levels of that consciousness, unfolding into the consciousness of my family, the consciousness of my lineage, the consciousness of my race, the consciousness of humanity, and then divine consciousness.
At each level, I could see and feel anything that other consciousnesses at the lower level felt. For example, as family consciousness, I understood that my sister Laura and I are a single soul that split in two to live this human experience. When I embodied the consciousness of humanity, I could feel the pain, the pleasure, or any other sensation of any other living person. I chose several human consciousnesses at random and could embody them for a few seconds, recall all their memories, hear their thoughts.
One of the consciousnesses I chose was that terrified girl in El Salado. I felt her panic and anguish again, but then I discovered something: it was not that I could embody her at will. It was that she was me. When I entered her consciousness, she remembered that she was not a frightened girl about to be killed, but a cosmic consciousness temporarily inhabiting a human body. She remembered having been in Hell and then having ascended to heaven, right when she discovered that, to find God, she had to forget herself and think of others. At that moment, fear ceased to exist and everything became love.