Innocence once lost, twice regained

Dreaming Awake
3. Innocence once lost, twice regained
(Cusco / Six of Cups)

I woke up fat with sleep for the first time since I arrived in Cusco. After overdosing on authentic wood furniture, hand made ceramics, old tapestries, and heavy, alpaca wool blankets, I confess, with some embarrassment, that I really enjoyed the familiar comforts of my new apartment with its plain, mass-produced furniture, and the memory-foam mattress, feather pillows and down comforter that reminded me of dreadful Ikea. I was on my rooftop terrace enjoying a lazy Sunday morning coffee in the sun when I received a message from Lukas saying he would pick me up in an hour for a vegan brunch party at Healing House. Healing House is the spiritual venue in Cusco that draws an international crowd of tourists and expats for events ranging from yoga to sound healing, breathwork, ecstatic dance and “mayan” cacao ceremonies. Lukas was going there to spread announcements for the upcoming ceremonies with the paqo Don Manuel, and a week-long retreat to his village at Ausangate mountain. He said since they didn’t operate like a mainstream tour agency, their promotions were mainly done through word of mouth among friends and in the alternative communities in Cusco. 

The threshold of the unknown

Dreaming Awake
1: The threshold of the unknown

My life has been haunted by a restless feeling of dislocation and of never belonging wherever I was. Do you know that feeling? The sense of being a misfit in your environment and culture, and not understanding its desires for house, career and family and its strivings to find happiness through money, or influence, or prestige. Have you also had those strange dreams and vague memories of an elsewhere that felt more like a true home than the disharmonious here and now of this surreal world?

When I was a small child I used to cry when mother left me at kindergarten because I thought the other children were aliens, bird-people with sharp beaks that had arrived from other worlds. Their beaks made strange, frightening noises, which I could not understand. I tried hard to fit in and make friends with these creatures, but I couldn’t really connect – their games and activities, like playing with dolls or pretending to fight with plastic-swords, made no sense to me. Probably they were the ones who saw me as the alien and the outsider in their world. I don’t know where I got such crazy ideas about the bird-people because I grew up in a communist country without Walt Disney or fantasy movies, with only one channel on black and white television that aired state propaganda and an occasional, badly acted local film. Once every few years there were James Bond movies playing in the cinema and my mother used to go with crowds of girlfriends. They were all secretly in love with Roger Moore. Or maybe it was with the imaginary universe of those films, which seemed so different from their monochrome reality.

I am the you in me

Integral Alchemy: A Guidebook for Phoenixes
Prologue: I am the you in me

I see you in your darkness, and I behold you in your boundless light. I come from your present and future past, from all that you have been, and from your hopes and dreams. I have been calling you for a long time, but your ears have been deaf to my song.

You have found your way to me after a dark night of the soul. You have journeyed through many unravellings and rebirths on the surface of your inner world, but you know this one is different. This is the night that will not wait upon time. Although you come before me with a humble request, I cannot promise to deliver you into the light. But I can sit with you, for a while, as you learn to light your own candles. And it is possible that your night may get darker still, before the dawn appears.

You cast your gaze outward, but you already know the answer you seek, even if it’s only a vague premonition of the untold question. Do you remember those fateful words from the Matrix, which seemed to herald the irreversible moment of the only choice that ever matters? The decision to give up the comforts of illusion for the unforgiving landscape of reality.

Stopping the World

DREAMING AWAKE
7. Stopping the World

I decided to travel to San Cristobal on the suggestion of American friends. My arrival met with a series of mishaps, which forced me to look beyond the apparent shitiness of circumstance … to find the golden lining behind it. Being tired of hotels, I had booked a flat through airbnb, but discovered upon arriving that it was misdescribed due to language barriers, and was really a room in a shared flat with a couple. And the internet had just crashed. My hosts were very apologetic, offered a refund, and the next morning drove me into town at a cafe with WIFI to search for an alternative. I reserved a small studio on the scenic hillside through booking.com, but when I got there, the owner apologized that it was unavailable because the previous renter called to say he was stranded for a couple of days in another town, and his possessions were still inside. He recommended a B&B of a friend, on the other side of town, until the situation could be sorted out. I sat in his garden, exhausted and drained by the whole experience, and from carrying my luggage around, and just allowed myself to cry through the desperation of not being in control … of life. I decided there was nothing to do except surrender to the unknown, and instead of searching online for yet another place, I asked my intuition to guide me to whatever was best.

The Gaian Mind

Dreaming Awake
5. The Gaian Mind

I decided to spend a couple of weeks in Cusco before leaving Peru; I knew that during those 3 days I stayed when I first arrived, I had not given the city a chance, and that I had to look deeper at the source of my own resistance. I rented an apartment just on the other side of San Blas, near Calle Recoleta, in a modern residential area away from the historic center and tourist crowds. During the first days I sat on benches in the main square, Plaza de Armas, which was known as Huacaypata or the place of crying during the Inca empire because the nobility cried during their ceremonies … and I people watched, a lot. Or meditated with my eyes open, observing both the streams of life passing before me, and my reactions to it. It was uncanny, like I was there but not there, seeing it from some other eyes outside me – I still felt an afterglow of my last ayahuasca journey, already now in the distant past, like I was two beings living life in overlapping dimensions at the same time.

The seeker’s undoing

Dreaming Awake
4. The Seeker’s Undoing

The journey to Peru has been an encounter with landscapes of sublime, breathtaking beauty mixed with the marks of devastation left behind by global capitalism. The mountain peaks beckon me everywhere I go, when my gaze is cast up, toward the sky, but as I look down at the roadside, I see piles of scattered garbage, crushed bottles of all shapes and colors, plastic wraps, Styrofoam, remnants of food – and stray dogs pawing through it all, trying to survive another day. Mounds of garbage have been omnipresent wherever I go: on the cobblestone streets and stone steps of the bohemian San Blas neighborhood in Cusco, outside the city limits near the ruins, on mountain roads leading to small villages, on bridges crossing the Urubamba river, on the river banks. The contrast between nature and human wreckage is … heartbreaking. And it can’t be dismissed as a plague of tourism; aside from the respect for nature of the indigenous Quechua, I’ve seen many locals leave trash on the roadside and show a disregard for their own backyard.

Behind the veil

Dreaming Awake
3. Behind the veil (Pisac)

I knew coming to Peru would be linked to ayahuasca, even before I arrived. But I could not glimpse the end at the beginning. Few of us can. That is why although each journey already contains the seed of its completion at the start, it unfolds over time, waiting for understanding to ripen. The insight that dawned, slowly, like the path cleared by a snail, was that I came to Peru not to go deeper into my work with ayahuasca, but to leave her behind. The parting felt like holding a beloved friend and teacher in my embrace, and with teary eyes and a feeling of peaceful melancholy, saying: “Thank you for coming into my life, I am so grateful for the beautiful dance we have had together. I know the hour has come to say goodbye. But there is no real separation between us. I have extracted your finest wisdom and your silent grace. You remain forever in my heart, and in my soul.”

Giving up the struggle

Dreaming Awake
2. Giving up the struggle (Sacred Valley)

I came to Peru out of a feeling of inevitability that I cannot explain. Even now. The idea was first planted in the garden of my desire in 2016, when I collaborated with Shipibos to organize ayahuasca ceremonies in Berlin. As an exchange, they invited me to an indigenous village near Pucallpa, to live and train with them. But things intervened, and life unfolded in its own uncanny direction, which is more intelligent than the best laid plans. My parents were already very ill – for the last two years of his life my father had become an invalid after a stroke, and my mother was caring for him as a full-time nurse, despite obvious signs of Alzheimer’s. I had strange, recurring dreams of being in a mountain village of hobbit houses, my father beckoning me to enter, saying, “Come, it’s time.” I intuited that things had reached a desperate turning point, and that I had to go to Romania to help my parents. I stayed for 18 months; they both died within a year of each other. It felt like I was saying goodbye not just to my parents or my childhood home, but to a cycle that had constructed the deepest layers of my identity. And after 9 years of living in Berlin, freshly divorced and in a limbo of uncertainty about my current path and life purpose, it seemed like it was also time to let go of the history that shaped my most recent ideas of who and what I was.

Navigating the Bardo

Dreaming Awake

1. Navigating the Bardo (Berlin)

The years have passed, but the moment remains with me. Not as memory, but as an eternal present spiraling back on itself, suspended in the gaps of time. Like a blink of timeless insight that still has its secrets to reveal. On that fateful spring day in Berlin, in 2018, as I lay dying … I heard his voice call to me. It seemed very distant, as if it was coming from behind a door marking a threshold I did not know how to bridge.

For what seemed like an interminable stretch of agony, I had been lying in a primeval swamp, feeling my body-mind disintegrating, as if small molecules were breaking off and being swallowed by the swamp thing. There were multitudes of greenish-brown fractal creatures swirling and dancing in the liquid muck, simultaneously outside and inside me. They were many, but identical, moving as one body. I heard a loud, high-pitched noise, which reminded me of a dentist’s drill, or more like the buzzing of electrified, mechanical flies. I suspected it was really the sound of my own dissolution, as the center holding me together was spinning and releasing small fragments in a centrifugal movement. I felt like I was caught in a loop, going back and forth between struggling to resist and allowing myself to be absorbed by the swamp. 

Shamanic Self-therapy (workshop)

(This is a very different kind of text, and I had some initial hesitations about posting it because it’s simply a practical handout for one of my workshops, rather than the crafted, quasi-poetic essays I’ve usually written. But perhaps its practicality makes it that much more relevant – so I’m sharing it in the hope that the ideas, exercises and guided meditations described in it will find their resonance in the right hands, and hearts…)

The essence of shamanism is dreaming; all the different external rituals of shamanic traditions are secondary. Shamanic dreaming is a wake up call from our habitual sleepwalking, or what Charles Tart called our “consensus trance” … into a non-ordinary reality, in which thoughts communicate with each other like filaments of light, bodies morph and become animal, plant and mineral, and humans soar on the wings of eagles to pluck sacred symbols from the clouds. Australian aborigines describe this non-ordinary reality as dreamtime. In the Mohawk language, a shaman is called dreamer, or “ratetshents.” The original Siberian word “šamán” means one who is lifted up in ecstatic trance to receive the gift of gnosis. Gnosis has a double aim: attaining inner sovereignty by recognizing and integrating one’s subpersonalities and dark shadows, and a direct download of cosmic consciousness, or what in magical-esoteric traditions is called communion with one’s higher self.