was not outside the realm of believability—at least not for me. Miraculous healings were something with which I had some experience.
During a trip to Brazil, I was honored with an invitation to assist Antonio De Padua, a well-known shaman, with performing some healings. Antonio asked me to help diagnose and later cleanse the energy from several of the large number of faithful who lined up daily outside his church. On the same trip, I was selected by another healer to remove a pair of ten-inch-long forceps from the back of his patient during psychic surgery in San Paulo. They had been inserted by the ghost energy of one Dr. Fritz, a surgeon who died over 100 years ago but whose spirit and knowledge many medically untrained Brazilian healers claim to channel.
I was also on the healing end of a bizarre ceremony wherein a Brazilian shaman wielded a scalpel inches from my abdomen, cut ting into my spiritual essence—my aura. I had requested a personal healing, and the shaman both accurately diagnosed and cured my bodily disorder. The same shaman healed a bruised disk in Shirl's neck. And that's not all . . .
We once witnessed a healer emanating visible light from five of his seven chakras. Truth be told, we've even spent considerable time with healers who claim to receive their enlightenment from timedimension travelers, or aliens from another universe.
[Note: Chakra is a yoga term for wheel-shaped energy centers in the body, most often thought to be seven in number. Each chakra is believed to possess distinctive properties relating to particular body organs and deities. The lowest three (at the base of the spine, navel, and solar plexus) are said to be male, or yang, and relate to the emotions of survival, control, and power. The highest three (at the the throat, between the eyes, and at the crown of the head) are female, or yin, and relate to communication and the psychic or spiritual aspects of our nature. The heart chakra, in the center of the body, represents love—the strongest emotion in the universe. It is considered by many to be both male and female.
The mere fact that someone I had never seen, miles from modern medical assistance, in the dead of night, was spitting into the poison I was soon to ingest did not seem to be a significant enough factor for me to reject the ceremony outright.
A Proverbial Flying Leap
The shaman began with the five who wished only to experience the mind-altering ceremony and not the healing. Each was presented to the shaman, who administered the sacred potion from a small bowl. This was immediately followed by a trago chaser to clear the palate. Then they were told to wait.
Before I was summoned by the shaman, my wife (who had been the first of our group to consume the ayahuasca) suddenly groaned, grabbed her tummy, and quickly exited the enclosure. It was clear where she was headed and what she was going to do. I knew she must really be sick because she'll do almost anything to avoid throwing up. When a second member of our group got violently ill, I began to reevaluate my decision.
Suddenly I heard my name being called. As I approached the shaman, I could feel his powerful presence in the darkness. He gave me the bowl and I quickly gulped the bitter drink before I could change my mind. The highly potent trago tasted sweet by comparison and I think I took several large gulps to wash the bitterness from my mouth.
By the time I returned to my partner, I could see the hallucinatory properties of the drug taking effect on those who had consumed it earlier. They seemed to be lost in their own little worlds . . . and I couldn't wait to discover mine.
I guess I expected a sudden, dramatic revelation or something because, after what seemed to be ample time, I still didn't feel anything unusual—if you didn't count the sudden need to share an impromptu and previously unrealized intellectual insight regarding the specifics of UFO technology with my partner, Lynne.
For a reason I could not explain, I possessed unexpected knowledge about a complex navigational guidance system "they'' had placed under the earth's surface. I knew exact details regarding round eye-shaped beacons buried about six to ten feet deep at systemic intervals across the surface of the planet. I knew they were navigational devices, transmitting a square beam of light into space for the alien visitors to use as guidance beacons for their sojourns to our planet.
As I was beginning to pinpoint the exact locations of some of the nearby transmitters, I was summoned back to earth-bound reality by the shaman who had been preparing for the next phase of my sacred healing journey. I was led to an isolated corner of the enclosure where I prepared for what was about to happen.
I was placed on my back in pitch-black darkness. The shaman began by drinking more ayahuasca as he sang his way into an altered state—based on the amount of the toxin he must have already consumed, he should have been well on his way to complete unconsciousness. John Perkins warned me to close my eyes as the shaman began by camaying trago all over my face and exposed body. I soon realized that I was being drawn into the shaman's state of awareness. Everything in the darkness began to feel strangely familiar while simultaneously remaining distant and foreign.
Then I saw them.
Snakes . . . a pit of a countless number of very large snakes, all slowly slithering and moving past each other, not unlike the creepy scenes in an early Indiana Jones movie. And guess who was in the center of them?
While my logical mind was actively promoting the concept that this was a probably a hallucination or an illusion, a separate feeling-self knew that the visualization was too real to be dismissed as a simple fantasy. I shook my head numerous times in an attempt to rid myself of the images, but they promptly reappeared when I became still.
Then the shaman touched my upper body and I was certain that he was about to put a live snake on my chest. My heart was beating rapidly now, busily pumping a full year's supply of adrenaline throughout my body in mere seconds. I was convinced that the shaman possessed the ability to read my mind and was about to confront my fear of snakes by the most direct means possible.
However, I also became aware of yet a third self—an observer part of me that was separate from my logical and emotional bodies, calming me with a different message. This larger self was, perhaps for the first time in my life, conceptualizing that these presumably scary images might actually be . . . friendly. The detached self was introducing a subtle subtext suggesting that, although I thought I had come to heal minor physical disorders, I may actually be addressing a far larger ailment: intense fear. I remained motionless during the entire experience, afraid to move. The procedure took on a surreal form, like a dream, and I was uncertain what was real and what was imaginary.
Waking the Snake
Those who study the dream state have discovered that we are unable to move our bodies during an intense dream or nightmare due to our bodies' natural secretion of a paralyzing chemical. My ayahuascaaltered state of consciousness was definitely dream-like in that respect, having paralyzed my body even while I remained in full waking consciousness.
We were well into the healing before I realized that the snakes I was seeing were not in physical form. The shaman had just been brushing my body with a soft healing tool while shaking a rattle to accompany his continuous, consciousness-raising chanting. However, in spite of the fact that the reptiles existed only as a mental image, they were very real—on an experiential level.
I later realized that the snake imagery was a symbol of kundalini—latent spiritual energy that, when aroused, leads to enlightenment. Kundalini is depicted on the walls of ancient temples in Egypt as a serpent that lies coiled at the base of the spine in the primary chakra, known as the muladhara. When it is awakened, it begins to ascend through the chakra system, unleashing powers of awareness and enlightenment as it goes.
My
