T2E19 - La Regresión

As the effect of the yagé began to fade from my system, the mystical revelations and that sensation of union and integration with the universe and humanity dissolved into a torrent of illogical and disordered thoughts. I still felt like an otherworldly being, but my visions were more like word games without much meaning:

"God is a four-letter word and yagé also has four letters... Everything worth anything in the world has four letters: dad, mom, love, sex..."

Suddenly I was trying to suck the fingers of my friend Gabriel, after he put his hand on my shoulder to ask me if I was already okay so we could get ready to leave. I looked at him, probably with bulging eyes, and told him:

"Are we going to make love? I'm making love with everyone!"

My friend's burst of laughter made me realize that what for me was the poetic description of my fusion with the totality had sounded like the words of a feverish madman; so from then on, I kept my cosmic introspections to myself. I stood up with difficulty and followed Gabriel while my mind remained under the bombardment of ideas and thoughts that were increasingly random and disconnected.

When I managed to reach the farmhouse, near the place where the ceremony attendees' cars were parked, I ran into my cousin Tania and my friend Adriana. Both embraced me with great affection, making evident the worry they had felt for me that day.

Adriana told me what she had heard when I was in the most difficult part of my descent into hell and that she had come to fear for my life. During our time there Tania and I didn't talk much, but she did tell me she had been very scared. A couple of weeks later she also told me that during the days following the ceremony she had trouble falling asleep and had had some episodes of panic in which she returned to the sensation of darkness and danger she had felt during the ceremony that day.

I, for my part, although I had finished the ceremony with an incredible sense of well-being and the most sublime experience I had lived up to that moment, felt very uneasy about everything that had happened. In the first place, because not only had I failed to help my friends in their healing process with the yagé, but I also felt that I had become, if not a burden, then a source of worry for them.

Gabriel hadn't even managed to enter an altered state of consciousness despite having taken several doses of yagé, Adriana and Tania had been left terrified by what I had lived through, and even the taita had had to dedicate a good part of the ceremony time to helping me. It had been a hard dose of reality for my pretensions of shaman and spiritual guide.

The experience of union with the totality, with universal consciousness and humanity, in addition to the divine revelations I had received, should have overshadowed the sinister experiences that preceded them. However, that had been so traumatic that I couldn't stop looking for an explanation for what had happened.

One thing were the visions of evil and fear I had had before, and a very different thing was feeling myself as the origin of that evil. I had never had thoughts of violence toward other people like the ones I had that morning in La Mesa. The images of blood sacrifices and other horrors repeated in my head like a disturbing question: what if my purpose isn't to free myself from the darkness and become an enlightened being, but to awaken that monster that I now felt sleeping inside me and let it out?

As could be expected, I consulted Mara about this experience and she invited me not to give so much importance to the event, to see it simply as a lesson in humility and as an encounter with the darkness of the world. I also told elder Suagagua what had happened to me and his response puzzled me even more, since according to him the problem was in the yagé itself, for not being a plant native to the territory where I was. He told me that by participating in those ceremonies, what I was doing was opening spiritual channels that I didn't know how to handle and that parasitic spirits and sorcerers could use to harm me.

None of these explanations satisfied me completely, so I kept searching among the spiritual people I had met up to that moment and in whom I saw a high level of knowledge about esoteric and mystical matters.

One of the people I consulted was Santiago Salazar, a young mystic who was part of the Muisca community of elders Suagagua and Yanguma. I went to him because I had heard him speak at some of the meetings with the Muiscas in the maloca of the Jardín Botánico and it seemed to me that his words were especially close to what I sensed I would find behind the veil of reality. Santiago talked about the astral body, jinas, mantras, energy transmutation and other terms I found fascinating. However, I must admit that the other reason he seemed like a wise person to me was because his physical appearance closely resembled the Western image of Jesus of Nazareth and therefore he also reminded me of my godfather Diego.

After a meeting in the maloca I approached him and briefly told him what had happened to me at the ceremony. I told him that on some occasion I had heard him talk about the darkness that dwells in the heart of man and the need to do "the work" to snatch the fire from the demon and enlighten ourselves, and that I wanted to know more about it.

Santiago told me that besides being a walker of spirituality he was a clinical psychologist and that he had a particular practice in his office in which he combined psychoanalysis therapies with spiritual therapies, and that he believed he could help me unveil the mystery.

I gladly accepted the offer and we agreed on an appointment at his office located on the outskirts of the city. I visited him there one morning and was amazed to find the place on a beautiful farm in the western hills of Bogotá. There, amid trees and shrubs typical of the cold savanna, Santiago attended to his patients in a small cabin completely removed from the noise of the city.

I took off my shoes before entering and he asked me to enter backwards, revealing in that way that he considered the place sacred. I did so and found inside the room a great quantity of esoteric symbols: pentagrams, Stars of David, a Yin-Yang, quartz crystals, drums and shamanic necklaces.

A small CD player harmonized the place with music and mantras, probably Buddhist. In short, the place seemed charming to me and being there surrounded by magic and mysticism I felt totally at home. I didn't know where the initiatory path I had embarked on would lead me, but Santiago's cabin would become the archetype of what I wanted my life to be in the future: wisdom, peace, mysticism, healing.

The therapy consisted of a kind of spiritual massage in which Santiago didn't make much contact with his hands. Instead, he used electrical equipment, musical instruments, essences, hot stones and other resources. While I lay on the table over an electric blanket, I felt the heat of the stones and slight electrical impulses that Santiago applied to acupuncture points. Then I would hear a triangle, little bells, a Tibetan bowl or a drum.

The pleasant experience lasted a little over half an hour, after which Santiago invited me to get up, do some breathing exercises and drink a glass of water. Then he began to narrate what he "saw" during the therapy: he told me that I had a lot to heal in the sexual part, that what I had seen and felt in the yagé was the result of a disordered sexuality, and that if I wanted to transcend all that, I would have to start doing the great work.

What was the great work? Santiago said it without beating around the bush: sacred sexuality, transmuting sexual energy and raising it through the chakras until connecting with the seventh chakra at the crown of the head and, through it, with divinity. He told me it was a difficult process, that it required a lot of willpower and strength, and that by doing it many difficulties would present themselves, but that everything would be worth it when I began to awaken psychic and spiritual powers.

I asked him if he could give me somewhat more precise indications of how to begin at least, and he answered that everything I wanted to know I could find in the books of the elder master Samael Aun Weor. That name resonated in my mind immediately because it was the same author that a mysterious religion teacher from school had referenced when he talked to us about astral travel and practical magic.

Santiago recommended I first read a book called "El Misterio del Áureo Florecer" and, when I was ready, "El Matrimonio Perfecto". I'll talk about these books later when I refer to Gnosis, but that day in his office he gave me some initial "tips": I would have to learn to have orgasms without ejaculating, have sexual relations every day without involving lust, and at the moment of orgasm pronounce the following mantra out loud:

"IIIIIIIII... AAAAAAAAAA... OOOOOOOO..."

I was left ashen by those strange instructions. The prospect of having sexual relations every day was undoubtedly attractive, but not under the conditions the great work prescribed. Even so, I committed myself to getting the two books Santiago had recommended and doing everything possible to try the curious technique.

After this, Santiago shared with me some mambe, the coca and yarumo powder I described in the episode "El pueblo vestido de blanco", and a little ball of chimú. The chimú was yet another tobacco preparation, apart from ambil, ambira and hoska (see "Los Abuelos Muiscas"). Its consistency, color and smell were similar to those of ambil, but when the chimú made contact with my tongue, I noticed its taste was much stronger. Santiago asked me to put it under my tongue and so I did, even though I felt it burning my skin.

I started having uncontrollable hiccups and swallowing saliva made me gag, but a few seconds later, as the chimú finished dissolving in my mouth, I felt my whole body vibrate, my heart race and my consciousness fuse again with the rest of the universe. For a little over five minutes I felt that same cosmic connection I had felt during the yagé ceremony, and when I came back to myself, a sensation of well-being, gratitude and presence took hold of me.

I said goodbye to Santiago full of emotion for what had just happened and with great expectation for everything I would learn in master Aun Weor's books. Even so, I regretted not yet finding a concrete or satisfactory answer to the hell I had lived through in my last yagé ceremony. Santiago had told me the reason was my "sexual disorder", but the truth was that I didn't consider my sexual life to match that description. At least not since the yagé had transformed me a couple of years earlier.

I bought Samael Aun Weor's books and began to delve into the Christian Gnostic knowledge that Samael preached. I'll speak in greater depth about Samael and Gnosis later, but for the moment, I found what I discovered in Gnosis fascinating. The level of mysticism and practicality I found in Samael's books was exactly what I believed would lead me to true spiritual wisdom and a deep understanding of the intangible reality underlying the material world.

At the same time, I used the free time I had outside the house to listen to the Vipassana meditation discourses. It was a technique that Santiago had briefly mentioned to me, based on the teachings of the Buddha and compiled by an Indian teacher named S.N. Goenka. Santiago had done the 10-day spiritual retreat in which those discourses are given and the technique of meditating with one's own breath is taught, and he recommended that I get the discourses and listen to them with great attention.

I also signed up for yoga classes that the company I worked for had instituted as part of the additional benefits for employees. I was lucky that in the time slot I chose for my yoga sessions I was the only student, so I quickly became friends with Margy, the instructor. After the 45-minute sessions of meditation, stretching and asanas, we would talk about spirituality; I taught her about yagé and ancestrality and she shared her knowledge of Buddhism and Hinduism with me.

In one of those talks I told her about my search for answers after that yagé ceremony in which I asked for blood sacrifices while I felt I was incarnating the very demon. Margy asked me if I had tried any regression therapy. Perhaps, she told me, what had happened to me didn't have to do with any experience of this life but of a previous incarnation.

I didn't know if I fully believed in reincarnation after death, but my recent interest in Hinduism made me think it was a great possibility. Some years before I had read the book "Many Lives, Many Masters" by Brian Weiss, so I had quite a bit of information on the subject, although I had never gone to a therapist who did regressions under hypnotism.

Margy then gave me the phone number of María Eugenia Calderón, a person she had met some time before, and of whom she told me she was an expert in past-life regression therapies. I took the contact and soon made my first appointment with the one I sensed then would be a new teacher on my exciting path.

A couple of weeks later I found myself in María Eugenia's office, which was and, as far as I know, still is located in the El Lago neighborhood in the northeast of Bogotá. María Eugenia was a young woman with the formal and calm appearance of a psychologist, not of someone mystical. She explained that her therapy was based on the content of "A Course in Miracles", a book supposedly written by divine inspiration that narrates esoteric and mystical teachings that Jesus Christ himself would have dictated to the New York psychologist Helen Schuman in the 1960s. What especially caught my attention was that María Eugenia told me her therapy didn't use hypnosis, but on the contrary I would be fully conscious at all times.

Without further preamble, María Eugenia invited me to follow her into a beautiful office with blue walls adorned with Christian images, flowers, a relaxing little water fountain and, of course, relaxing music. I lay down on a thin table and María Eugenia asked me to close my eyes. She stood behind my head, placed her hands on the sides of my temples and led me through brief breathing exercises.

Then she recited out loud a long prayer in which she asked permission to see my "akashic records" and help me in the healing I was seeking that day. The therapist indicated that I should follow her instructions and tell her what I felt, what I saw, what I heard, but not to worry if I didn't see anything immediately. She also told me she had permission to see some things that I wouldn't be able to see, but that between the two of us we would unveil the story that Master Jesus would reveal to us that afternoon.

María Eugenia asked me to go to the first memory of my childhood that came to my mind, the first memory I had of a moment of anger, a moment of sadness, and other indications. The images came quickly to my mind, but in none of them was there anything particularly relevant to what I wanted to find.

Then she told me that my fears didn't come from this life and asked me to travel to the point where my suffering had originated. At that moment I felt confused because until then I had been totally honest with the memories I had narrated to her. Some of them I hadn't remembered for a long time, but I was sure they were legitimate memories. But when María Eugenia told me to travel to my previous incarnation, I didn't know if I should simply imagine anything and give it credit or better tell her I didn't remember anything.

I opted for the second option and she, with complete calm, told me not to rush, that when I began to remember I should let her know. I took a deep breath and devoted myself to staying calm, waiting for any unusual thought that might come to my mind. A few minutes passed when I began to feel restless — not as much as when I was in a yagé ceremony, but I definitely didn't feel normal.

The restlessness soon turned into fear and my whole body started trembling without any explanation. I told her what I was feeling and she asked me to try to see around me, to describe to her where I was. I did so and the image turned out credible enough for my conscious self to describe it to María Eugenia:

– "I'm lying on a table, in the middle of a warehouse or something like that. I see high windows and I feel I'm in a town, not in the city. Besides, I'm very scared, I'm not here of my own will... I'm tied to this table and I'm afraid because I know they're coming for me and they're going to hurt me a lot."

María Eugenia intervened and told me:

– "You're tied to that table; I want you to move forward to the moment when the people who are coming for you arrive. Who are they?"

Me: – "I don't know, they're men, they're all around me, but I know they're very angry, they want to kill me."

María Eugenia: – "Why do they want to kill you?"

Me: – "I think it's because of their women: daughters, sisters, wives."

María Eugenia: – "Don't be afraid, you're safe, but you have to relive that experience so you can find the lesson you must learn. Who are those women, do you know them?"

Me: – "I think so; among them I see two women I know in this life." They were Ángela María and Lina, two women with whom I had had somewhat stormy relationships in the previous years.

At that moment something very strange happened to me: I was lying with the soles of my feet on the table with my knees raised. Suddenly, I felt as if an invisible force had pushed my knees to the sides, opening my legs like those of a woman in labor. At that moment my heart raced, partly because of the frightening scene my mind was recalling, or creating, and partly because it was the first time my body moved without my authorization or command without being under the influence of the yagé.

I truly felt I couldn't move and that something bad was going to happen to me at any moment.

Suddenly I felt my face deform as if it were wrinkling up in seconds and I felt an intense cold in my genitals.

At that moment, María Eugenia led me through some new breathing exercises and again placed her hands on my temples, indicating with her soft voice that I should return to the present moment, remembering that everything was fine, that everything was for the best, and that Jesus Christ was there to heal me and lift that burden from my shoulders.

When I calmed down, María Eugenia told me she had seen the part I didn't see and narrated the complete story to me:

– "In your previous life you were a very physically attractive man; women sought you out a lot and because of that you became a vain and superficial person. Besides, you enjoyed the power you had over women and you became a black magician. You practiced occultism and sorcery with sexual energy, and that's why you chose young, pretty women for your rituals.

The men you saw were avenging the suffering you caused those women, and to punish you they castrated you and disfigured your face with acid, boiling water or something like that.

But the worst part is that you didn't die that day; instead you had to live like that for many more years. Your death was very sad, full of resentment and loneliness"

I don't know if having seen all that made me feel better or worse than before, but they were definitely answers that, despite being improbable, fit very well with various aspects of my life: if I had practiced black magic, surely there would be demons and dark beings accompanying me to see if they could "twist" me back toward darkness. Besides that, I always preferred to get involved with young women, whom I somehow dazzled only to set aside later when I got excited about another young woman.

What I saw in the regression also fit well with what Santiago had told me about healing my sexuality.

My descent into darkness had led me to a search that was becoming increasingly complex. Now I saw myself as an evil ex-sorcerer, an exploiter of women, on the way to expiating my guilt and ascending to a superior state of consciousness in which I would no longer resort, consciously or unconsciously, to manipulation and evil to achieve my goals.

The problem was that I didn't see myself that way, and the people who knew me didn't see me that way either. Certainly I had caused pain to more than one woman in my life, but I considered myself essentially good and therefore I still failed to understand where that evil I sometimes felt when I took yagé came from. It was also true that my libido was considerably high, which had already caused me some problems, but for my age and possibilities, I hadn't had a large number of sexual partners, nor had I ever resorted to deception or tricks to get someone into bed.

However, from then on my spiritual path became an extension of the search for an explanation for that evil that emerged in my strong yagé ceremonies. I had also already understood that sex, along with death, were at the center of the human drama and that my purpose would be to find the correct way of relating to those two forces so that they wouldn't lead me to descend into darkness again.

I had already heard the Muisca elders talk about the work of "maíz viche", or the secret of ancestral sexual magic, and I was willing to follow the path that would lead me to obtain that knowledge. I had also read about tantric sex in India and I agreed with the Muiscas and Samael Aun Weor's Gnostic theories that, to achieve full enlightenment, one had to transmute the fire of sexuality and raise it in the form of light through the spinal column using the containment of the libido and techniques I still didn't understand.

It didn't seem like a coincidence that the drama that had led me to take yagé in the first place had a lot to do with my sexual life, and that the regression María Eugenia did on me had shown me a past existence of sexual excess. The following years of my spiritual search were marked by this exploration and I'll talk about it in the following chapters. Nevertheless, what didn't quite fit for me was why the yagé showed me such a colossal inner evil.

I couldn't find an answer to this question during my years of spiritual journey in Colombia, although the difficult question was present at all times and, in fact, it repeated itself in two more yagé ceremonies. However, in a totally unexpected way, I received what I understood as a complete and satisfactory explanation for this riddle nine years later, already living in Canada, from the mouth of the famous Canadian psychologist and university professor Jordan Peterson.

I got to know Peterson through a great friend from the spiritual path who told me about his sharp analyses of the human psyche and the drama of existence, shortly before writing these lines. After listening to some of professor Peterson's lectures, I found myself fascinated by his eloquence and the depth of his observations, so I devoted myself to devouring his masterful talks on YouTube.

In some of them, Peterson analyzes the psychological meaning of the Bible, particularly the book of Genesis. They are 15 talks of almost three hours each, in which the author interprets the life teachings that can be extracted from what he considers are essentially archetypal models of humanity, condensed into fictional stories that are seemingly simple but at the same time disturbingly believable.

In the third episode of this series of Bible analyses, called "Biblical Series III: God and the Hierarchy of Authority", Peterson says the following while pointing at an image of the god Atlas carrying the world on his shoulders in his presentation:

"Atlas voluntarily carries the world on his shoulders. It's like when Christ carries the sins of the whole world. It's exactly the same. It's the idea that you should see in yourself the horror of all humanity and take responsibility for it.

And the interesting thing is that if you see in yourself all the horror of humanity, you're going to respect yourself much more than before. Because it's very useful to know that you're a monster. And being a monster doesn't mean you have to be one, but it's very useful to know that you are one.

One thing Jung said, which I find fascinating in his writings and which distinguishes him from Joseph Campbell, who talks about following happiness, is that Jung clearly said that the first step toward enlightenment is to become aware of the shadow.

What he meant was: everything horrible that has been done to human beings has been done by humans, and you are one of them.

You have to understand this, and understanding it means knowing under what circumstances you would have done the same. And it's devastating to try to imagine yourself taking part in a medieval torture and to understand that you would be capable of something like that. Knowing that changes you forever; learning that this is what you are is very useful, because by knowing what you're like you become a different being.

Another thing I learned from Jung is that you can't be a good person until you know all the evil you contain; it's not possible, partly because you have no power. If you're innocent, you've never hurt anyone and you don't even have the capacity to kill a fly, why would anyone take you seriously? You're a domestic animal, at best! And a rather despicable one at that.

It's very strange; it's odd that the revelation of the capacity for evil is a precondition for being able to do good. But why would you have any interest in doing something good unless you understood the consequence of not doing it?

You have to take these things seriously; they're not children's games, they're developed adults' games. I learned that from having small children. A chapter of my new book is called "Don't Let Your Children Do Things That Make You Hate Them". I wrote that after knowing I'm a monster. I thought: "I'm going to make sure I like my children; I'm going to make sure I like what they do when they're around me, because I'm much bigger than them, much crueler than them and I have tricks up my sleeve they can't even imagine, and if they irritate me I'm going to take it out on them".

And if you don't think you're the kind of person who would do that, then you're the kind of person who is doing it.

When I finished listening to those words, I stopped my bicycle startled, looked at the sky with welling eyes and realized that this was exactly what had happened to me. I couldn't have connected with the totality and become one with the universe, feeling the creative power, without first having known total isolation, the absence of love, the instinctive evil of the human being and the scorching fire of the hell of loneliness.

I understood that this is what it means that Jesus descended into hell for three days before being able to resurrect and ascend to heaven. It wasn't a merciful visit to the poor condemned souls before traveling to his Father's side; it was incarnating in himself all the suffering of humanity, in order to find, in human form, the expiation of his own inner demon and thus transform it into an angel of light.

I understood that Christ didn't come to save us; he came to teach us how to save ourselves.

5 years ago I feel grateful and blessed for having brought you into the world, that you would have chosen me to come and carry out this ministry. I'm sure that the presence of a religious man in the family doesn't have the spiritual forcefulness and service of a being like you.

The two women you saw impress me.