When I was younger I eagerly devoured the books of Carlos Castañeda as they appeared in print. I read and reread his descriptions of his encounters with the allies and the nagual. For me they were mysterious accounts of another world at serious odds with the insanity of the red-white-and-blue mental asylum north of the Rio Grande / Rio Bravo.
However, as I have spent more and more time in Latin America, beginning years ago in Mexico, I have found myself slowly being drawn onto the shamanic path. Back in the 1980s, I somehow managed to stumble across the path of some of Carlos Castañeda´s Mexican associates. A series of improbable events occurred over the course of several weeks that brought me face to face with the realization that, for whatever reason, I was interacting with a shamanic group whose life modus operandi and perception and mnanipulation of reality, whether physical, social or otherwise, was very substantially at variance with the rest of society.
More recently I have been involved with a number of South American shamans and the plant-based brews and concoctions that they use to access other realities. The effect for me has been to drive home the salient point that there is NO dividing line between the so-called physical world and spiritual realm.
The two are in fact part and parcel of the one and same continuum of reality, which is limitless in extent and mystery.
In recent weeks I have been working with malicagua, and even more so than ayahuasca or salvia divinorum, it has driven home to me the reality of the allies that Don Juan Matus taught Carlos Castañeda about. The same would be true of the nagual.
The shaman who is currently instructing me has told me that poweerful shamans of the past sometimes saw the essence of malicagua but that in its essential aspect it is impossible to rationally describe. It is beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend. Malicagua is not bound in any way that the human mind can conceive. It is limitless.
The variety of beings that it brings calling is truly stunning. Many of them appear to be ordinary, everyday humans; so ordinary, in fact, that repeatedly I have found myself asking the shaman if they are his covert confederates that he has slyly sent to trick me or confound me. He smiles and says, no, that these are all beings that mnalicagua is sending to me for its own unknown purposes and reasons.
In one recent ceremony an ordinary-looking man unobtrusively entered my field of vision as I sat quietly behind the shaman´s house. I perceived that he was sent by malicagua so I asked him if he had a message for me. He slowly turned toward me and silently beckoned for me to come closer. I approached him and he put his face right in front of mine. I then saw that this was no ordinary man and that his response was no ordinary answer, because his eyes were windows directly into the void. As I gazed at his eyes I saw that they opened directly into the limitless, indescribable, infinitude of total nothingness. Nothingness, because there are absolutely no words or mental concepts in our modern languages or cultures to describe or understand the reality of what his eyes expósed to my consciousness.
Sometime later, I became aware that another human being had appeared in front of me. This was a solitary Amazonian warrior wearing a mioderately large, circular feather headdress. He was very solemn, almost regal in his prospect. His head was backlit with a soft golden glow. His face was painted with a greenishish-blue pigment.
Later when I was describing him to the shaman it was his feeling that this man was a shaman-warrior from deeper in the Amazon, perhaps from Brazil or Peru, whom I may meet in person in the future.
When I was studying South American geography, back in the 1980s, the professor used to impress upon the class that the Amazon jungle is the lungs of the planet. Kill the Amazon, and the Earth as we know it is done. Now that I am here in South Amnerica I am sure that he was right. The fortunes of this planet and the human race rise and fall with the fortunes of the natural world, with the fortunes of the great forests on this planet, in particular, the grandest of them all, The Amazon.
As I meet more and more spirits of the forest, as the medicinal plants of South America speak to me and reveal more of themselves and their reality to me, ranging from spirit warrior allies carrying blow guns, bows, arrows and lances, and also a whole slew of very ordinary looking, Western European-type human beings, both male and female, to tree people, to hyper-conscious insect beings, to animals ranging from owls, to armadillos, snakes and javelinas, the veil between the natural spirit world and the everyday world of consensual social reality is becoming more and more tenuous.
In fact, this is what the so-called Powers That Be fear so much. They are in absolute dread of large numbers of people establishing a conscious connection with the natural world, because that fundamentally threatens the machine consciousness, the artificial, mechanical, machine driven control structure they have spent so many centuries clamping down on this planet.
But there is no future in their vision, no life juice in their hollow, mechanical, artificial reality that they impose by genocidal military force on people after people, country after country.
One of the things that malicagua has shown me is that the time is coming when humanity will run joyfully through the forest singing ecstatically at the top of our lungs in a magical, majestic symnphony of life, in planetary concert with the mighty trees of the deep forest. All of humanity in joyful, full throat harmony with the mighty, ancient trees of this world´s forests.
Huge changes will soon be upon us. Much of what is coming will be far different than what the so-called ruling elite of this planet expect. This is because they lack a spiritual core, they are hollow, soulless entities. For this reason, spiritual realities are incomprehensible to them, they cannot begin to fathom them.
But they have had their day. They have held sway and had their say. Chance after chance has been extended to them to turn from their ruinous, self-destructive course. Even now they could express genuine remorse for their multitudinous heinous deeds and throw themselves on the mercy of the Universe. But this presupposes a measure of humility and introspection that they appear to lack. And so it does appear that their fate is sealed. They will continue to cause enormous harm to the planet and all its creatures right up to the last instant --and then they will exit the global stage and a new era will begin
When I first began to drink malicagua the shaman came and took my watch from me. He said it was better for him to do that, because malicagua does not like watches. If people do not remove them beforehand, then after drinking malicagua they routinely remove their watches and fling them away into the underbrush. He also took my belt. Malicagua does not like leather either. People also routinely take off their belts and throw them away in the bushes.
Malicagua does not like to be metered or constrained. Just pure, infinite, natural consciousness, flowing like a mighty river straight from the Infinite Living Heart of the Amazon.
This is what the Powers That Be want to kill. But in the end, Mother Nature does prevail, in a manner that they absolutely do not expect, could never predict, do not comprehend, and moreover will not believe, not even when they are personally confronted with it to their very faces.